Cumulative Effect in Information Diffusion: Empirical Study on a Microblogging Network

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 8; no. 10; p. e76027
• Main Authors: Bao, Peng, Shen, Hua-Wei, Chen, Wei, Cheng, Xue-Qi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 01.10.2013; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Analysis; Blogging; Data mining; Diffusion; Diffusion effects; Exposure; Humans; Information Dissemination; Information processing; Innovations; International conferences; Internet; Mechanics; Microblogs; Models, Statistical; Neural Networks (Computer); Neurosciences; Science; Social behavior; Social Media; Social networks; Social organization; Studies; World Wide Web; Beijing China; China
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0076027

Cumulative effect in social contagion underlies many studies on the spread of innovation, behavior, and influence. However, few large-scale empirical studies are conducted to validate the existence of cumulative effect in information diffusion on social networks. In this paper, using the population-scale dataset from the largest Chinese microblogging website, we conduct a comprehensive study on the cumulative effect in information diffusion. We base our study on the diffusion network of message, where nodes are the involved users and links characterize forwarding relationship among them. We find that multiple exposures to the same message indeed increase the possibility of forwarding it. However, additional exposures cannot further improve the chance of forwarding when the number of exposures crosses its peak at two. This finding questions the cumulative effect hypothesis in information diffusion. Furthermore, to clarify the forwarding preference among users, we investigate both structural motif in the diffusion network and temporal pattern in information diffusion process. Findings provide some insights for understanding the variation of message popularity and explain the characteristics of diffusion network.