Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots.

ABSTRACT: It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is whether information spreads according to simple or complex dynamics: does each exposure to a piece of information have an independent probability of a user adopting it (simple contagion), or does this probability depend instead on the number of sources of exposure, increasing above some threshold (complex contagion)? Most studies to date are observational and, therefore, unable to disentangle the effects of confounding factors such as social reinforcement, homophily, limited attention, or network community structure. Here we describe a novel controlled e

SUBMITTER: Monsted B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5609738 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature