http://time.com/4672540/go-viral-on-internet/
The author of this TIME article goes over the concept of “going viral” and how information spreads online. Specifically, he illustrates how information spreads through Twitter and that information does not tend to cascade from user to user so much as be spread from one source to many recipients all at once. According to the article, “More than 90 percent of the messages didn’t diffuse at all. A tiny percentage, about 1 percent, was shared more than seven times. But nothing really went fully viral—not even the most popular shared messages. The vast majority of the news that people see on Twitter—around 95 percent—comes directly from its original source or from one degree of separation.” This is contrary to the popular belief that excellent content or important information will flow from user to user over several steps in a grand information cascade. Popular information came from popular sources, “…by publishers, celebrities, and other broadcasters who can reach thousands or even millions of people at once.”
The fact that “going viral” isn’t quite as it seems is very interesting and ties back to several of the topics we have covered in class. We would expect that if tweets were to go viral, it would be due to them being exposed to many users over weak ties. As more and more users are exposed to novel tweets, we would expect the likes/retweets to increase over time due to a cascading effect. However, the fact that most tweets only ever cascade twice (at most) is interesting because it shows how insular networks like Twitter really are. Information is curated in such a way that most information will never “go viral” over weak ties. Instead, the power of the rich-get-richer effect is fully displayed. The most popular users in the network are responsible for the majority of the popular information within the network. Quality posts and novel information may never travel far enough or garner enough interest to become viral, but posts from celebrities and news outlets have the potential to garner enough likes to cascade into “going viral” simply due to the sheer number of users who these sources tweet to.