Information Cascades on Twitter
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7062665
Social media allows everyone to have an opinion. Anyone is able to make a post or view someone else’s post and form their own opinion. However, information cascades are still able to form. This article studies behavior on twitter, and builds a model that is able to predict the cascade of information on twitter. The article provides the fact that the ability to retweet, quote retweet, and reply often creates an information cascade which is why businesses are able to use twitter for promotion successfully. The study is also able to predict how many interactions something will have on twitter, a metric of influence. Tweets with more interactions will have more influence and create more of a cascade than others.
Intuitively, information cascading on twitter makes sense. People often follow other people they are either friends with or people they agree with and want to hear their opinions about. All 3 of these features add information to a user’s timeline, which could be analogous to what we did in class. While many issues are multi-faceted, to make problems simple, an issue could have two sides. The retweets, quote retweets, and replies act the same way signals act for understanding if the world is in a good or bad state. If one person disagrees with something that is appearing on their timeline, and the information is from people they deemed credible, they may agree with the credible source, deeming them as more informed about the issue. Of course, nothing is really this simple, people don’t always blindly agree, but many are often influenced, or at least think about the other sides of an issue.