Studying the Spread of Memes across Social Networks
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~badityap/papers/composite-ccr12.pdf
The spread of information over the Internet is best studied using network models. One of the most common types of information on the Internet is the meme. Memes spread quickly across social networks, but tend to have short lifespans. Researchers at University of California, Virginia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon collaborated to study the spread of competing memes across different social networks. The researchers developed mathematical models to determine which of two related memes on Facebook and Twitter would “win” over the other, becoming more popular while the other one faded, as well as predict when both memes would become “extinct.”
The paper considered Facebook and Twitter to be part of a composite network, defined as “a single set of nodes with two distinct types of edges interconnecting them.” The memes spread separately across the two networks, but were also connected by transition edges when they were shared from one site to the other. The nodes were defined as users of Facebook and Twitter, and could be in one of two states depending on whether or not they had shared the meme. A meme shared from one user to another created an edge. The paper examined the probability of neighboring nodes becoming infected. This research can be applied to data more serious than memes, such as information and misinformation that spreads over social networks during natural disasters. Knowing which networks spread data more efficiently will make it easier for governments to provide correct information so that it will overtake other, less reliable sources.