Social Contagion on social media issues
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-10/uoe-sma101617.php
Social media now plays an important role on spreading ideas or images as the social norm. A study showed Twitter and Instagram might be responsible for encouraging extreme thinness since these images are more likely to get “likes”. Because of these social media, more women are inspired to achieve this “emaciated look”.
This is a form of social contagion on young people. For people using social media to adopt this “emaciated look” as the new norm or beauty, they probably have some implicit threshold q in their mind that if more than q% of his or her friends on social media adopts this idea, they will be convinced or unconsciously influenced to believe in this idea as well. For social media, it’s likely that the initial adopters are young people because they are the ones spending more time using these apps. We also know the only problem that will stop the spread of adoption to an entire graph is the form of clusters. That is if there are more than one densely connected group of nodes which only has a few inter-cluster connections, once the adoption is spread out completely within one cluster and is unable to exceed the threshold to spread to another cluster, the spread would stop. Since for social media, it’s likely people have lots of friends that are about the same age but only a limited number of friends that are from a different generation, the spread would eventually stop and forms this social contagion on young people.
In the graph below, if A is the initial node that adopts this extreme thin idea, then due to social contagion, nodes that are connected to A but B will eventually adopt this idea.
