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Abstract
Existing empirical studies suggest that statistical laws of information avalanches in social media lack robustness across systems. This paper analyzes nearly one billion time-stamped events from various online platforms (Telegram, Twitter, Weibo, etc.) over extended periods (more than ten years). It demonstrates that information propagation in social media is a universal and critical process, exhibiting identical macroscopic patterns across platforms regardless of system specifics. Power-law distributions and hyperscaling relations characterizing avalanche size and duration support the critical behavior. Statistical testing reveals a mixture of simple and complex contagion, with the complexity correlated to the information's semantic content.
Publisher
Nature Communications
Published On
Mar 14, 2022
Authors
Daniele Notarmuzi, Claudio Castellano, Alessandro Flammini, Dario Mazzilli, Filippo Radicchi
Tags
information propagation
social media
critical behavior
power-law distributions
complex contagion
semantic content
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