Impact of Repeated Exposures on Information Spreading in Social Networks

Clustered structure of social networks provides the chances of repeated exposures to carriers with similar information. It is commonly believed that the impact of repeated exposures on the spreading of information is nontrivial. Does this effect increase the probability that an individual forwards a message in social networks? If so, to what extent does this effect influence people’s decisions on whether or not to spread information? Based on a large-scale microblogging data set, which logs the message spreading processes and users’ forwarding activities, we conduct a data-driven analysis to explore the answer to the above questions. 

The results show that an overwhelming majority of message samples are more probable to be forwarded under repeated exposures, compared to those under only a single exposure. For those message samples that cover various topics, we observe a relatively fixed, topic-independent multiplier of the willingness of spreading when repeated exposures occur, regardless of the differences in network structure. We believe that this finding reflects average people’s intrinsic psychological gain under repeated stimuli. Hence, it makes sense that the gain is associated with personal response behavior, rather than network structure. 

Moreover, we find that the gain is robust against the change of message popularity. This finding supports that there exists a relatively fixed gain brought by repeated exposures. Based on the above findings, we propose a parsimonious model to predict the saturated numbers of forwarding activities of messages. Our work could contribute to better understandings of behavioral psychology and social media analytics.

Below:  Forwarding dynamics in a direct follower network. The figure in the left shows a simple direct follower network of root user 0. When user 0 posts a message, all of his followers will be exposed to this message once (the numbers in braces). In the second step, user 1 forwards this message (dark colour), all the followers of user 1, which is user 2, 3 and 4 (in the shaded area) are exposed to this message one more time. Then user 7 forwards this message. Same thing happens except that now user 4 has been exposed to the message three times since he follows both user 1 and user 7.

Below:  Number of users who forward messages under certain number of exposures. For the top 10 most active root users, we count the number of their followers who have forwarded their messages under certain number of exposures, respectively. In this figure, we show the median of these counts with respect to exposure number. In order to clearly show the results, the y-axis is transformed into a logarithmic scale. There are no remarkable forwarding activities when exposure number exceeds 5.

Below:  Forwarding probability under 1 to 8 exposures. Each value is the median of all the forwarding probabilities under the corresponding number of exposures. It is due to the rareness of data that the values under 7 and 8 exposures are zero.

Full article at: http://goo.gl/lOhwPd

By: Cangqi Zhou, Qianchuan Zhao,* and Wenbo Lu

Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), Department of Automation and TNList, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, CHINA

Conceived and designed the experiments: CZ QZ. Performed the experiments: CZ. Analyzed the data: CZ QZ WL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: CZ. Wrote the paper: CZ QZ WL.

* E-mail: nc.ude.auhgnist@cqoahz

  

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