Universality, criticality and complexity of information propagation in social media

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.

Daniele Notarmuzi, Claudio Castellano, Alessandro Flammini, Dario Mazzilli, Filippo Radicchi