research-article

The role of social networks in information diffusion

Authors:

Cameron Marlow,

Lada AdamicAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web

Pages 519 - 528

https://doi.org/10.1145/2187836.2187907

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Online social networking technologies enable individuals to simultaneously share information with any number of peers. Quantifying the causal effect of these mediums on the dissemination of information requires not only identification of who influences whom, but also of whether individuals would still propagate information in the absence of social signals about that information. We examine the role of social networks in online information diffusion with a large-scale field experiment that randomizes exposure to signals about friends' information sharing among 253 million subjects in situ. Those who are exposed are significantly more likely to spread information, and do so sooner than those who are not exposed. We further examine the relative role of strong and weak ties in information propagation. We show that, although stronger ties are individually more influential, it is the more abundant weak ties who are responsible for the propagation of novel information. This suggests that weak ties may play a more dominant role in the dissemination of information online than currently believed.

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Cited By

Meng FXie JSun JXu CZeng YWang XJia THuang SDeng YHu Y(2025)Spreading dynamics of information on online social networksProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences10.1073/pnas.2410227122122:4Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410227122
Sangiorgio EDi Marco NEtta GCinelli MCerqueti RQuattrociocchi W(2025)Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagementScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-84960-615:1Online publication date: 3-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84960-6
Peterson A(2025)AI and the problem of knowledge collapseAI & SOCIETY10.1007/s00146-024-02173-xOnline publication date: 19-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02173-x
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Index Terms

The role of social networks in information diffusion
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Sociology

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cover image ACM Other conferences

WWW '12: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web

April 2012

1078 pages

ISBN:9781450312295

DOI:10.1145/2187836

General Chairs:
Alain Mille
Université de Lyon, France
,
Fabien Gandon
INRIA, France
,
Jacques Misselis
HP, France
,
Program Chairs:
Michael Rabinovich
Case Western Reserve University, USA
,
Steffen Staab
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Univ. de Lyon: Universite de Lyon

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 16 April 2012

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WWW 2012

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Univ. de Lyon

WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012

April 16 - 20, 2012

Lyon, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Meng FXie JSun JXu CZeng YWang XJia THuang SDeng YHu Y(2025)Spreading dynamics of information on online social networksProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences10.1073/pnas.2410227122122:4Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410227122
Sangiorgio EDi Marco NEtta GCinelli MCerqueti RQuattrociocchi W(2025)Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagementScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-84960-615:1Online publication date: 3-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84960-6
Peterson A(2025)AI and the problem of knowledge collapseAI & SOCIETY10.1007/s00146-024-02173-xOnline publication date: 19-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02173-x
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