Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed

Whether they are modeling bookmarking behavior in Flickr or cascades of failure in large networks, models of diffusion often start with the assumption that a few nodes start long chain reactions, resulting in large-scale cascades. While reasonable under some conditions, this assumption may not hold for social media networks, where user engagement is high and information may enter a system from multiple disconnected sources. Using a dataset of 262,985 Facebook Pages and their associated fans, this paper provides an empirical investigation of diffusion through a large social media network. Although Facebook diffusion chains are often extremely long (chains of up to 82 levels have been observed), they are not usually the result of a single chain-reaction event. Rather, these diffusion chains are typically started by a substantial number of users. Large clusters emerge when hundreds or even thousands of short diffusion chains merge together. This paper presents an analysis of these diffus...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICWSM
• Authors: Eric Sun, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, Thomas M. Lento
• Keywords: Chain, Diffusion Chain, ICWSM 2009, Internet Technology, Social Media Network