The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion

Presented by Xu Zhang

Paper Information
Authors
Eytan Bakshy (Facebook, Menlo Park, CA, USA )
Social influence and information diffusion in networks

Itamar Rosenn (Facebook, Menlo Park, CA, USA)

Engineering Manager, Measurement Systems at Facebook

Cameron Marlow (Facebook, Menlo Park, CA, USA)

Various aspects of online communities

Lada Adamic (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA)

Structure and dynamics of social and information networks

Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web, April 16-20, Lyon, France, 2012. Times cited: 30

Content
Motivation Related work Experimental design Experimental result Conclusion My thought

Motivation
Social influence can play a crucial role in a range of behavioral phenomena
Dissemination of information Adoption of political opinions and technologies

Identify the influence remains a challenge

Individuals tend to engage in similar activities as their peers. Individuals with similar characteristics to associate with one another.

Related work
Diffusion and influence have been modeled in blogs, email, and sites (Twitter, Digg, and Flickr)
Correlation between the behavior-engaged friend number and probability of adopting the behavior Homophily? Peer influence?

Not all diffusion studies must infer whether one individual influenced another
Do not tell us about the relative importance of social networks in information diffusion

Experimental design
Experimental platform chose Design idea Population Metric

Experimental design --Experimental platform chose

A broad online population
Facebook is the most widely used social networking service in the world. (800million)

Users online personal networks reflect their real-world connections

Users on average maintain 48% of their real world contacts on the Facebook. Interaction among users is well correlated with self-reported intimacy.

Experimental design --Design idea

Experimental design --Design idea

Title: The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion

Has social networks: OU (feed mode) No social networks: U (no feed mode)

O=OU-U Information Diffusion

Information Shared

Experimental design --Design idea

If a user A shares a URL, will his friend B share the same URL?
Feed or no feed? Number of sharing friends? The relationship between A and B?(Tie strength)

Experimental design --Metric

How to judge the influence of social network?
Individual impact: The probability of a user share a URL Collective impact: The total incremental quantity of shared-URLs

Experimental design --Population

Random sample (253 million) of all Facebook users (500 million) who visited the site between August 14th to October 4th 2010, and had at least one friend sharing a link.

Experimental result
Individual impact Collective impact

Experimental result --Individual impact

Feed vs. No feed

Experimental result --Individual impact

Number of sharing friends(feed, no feed)

Experimental result --Individual impact

Number of sharing friends(feed, no feed)

Experimental result --Individual impact

Tie strength (feed, no feed; number shared=1)
2.83

3.84

Experimental result --Individual impact

Tie strength (feed, no feed; number shared=1)

Experimental result --Collective impact

Conclusion
Social network can increase the probability that a user share a URL. The larger the number of friends that share a URL, the bigger the probability that a user share a URL. Friends that have weak strength have a significant impact to social network.

My thought
Information diffusion Information sharing
A B
Content shared

C
Content read but not shared

Social network Facebook

The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion

The Role of Social Networks in Information Sharing within the Networks

The End!
Thanks!

Experimental design --Design idea

How to define the tie strength?
Previous work
Number of mutual contacts

This paper ()
Frequency of private online communication in the form of Facebook messages Frequency of public online interaction in the form of comments Number of real-world coincidences in terms of both users appearing in the same photograph Number of online coincidences in terms of both users responding to the same Facebook post

Experimental design --Design idea

How to construct the situation of feed and no feed?
Feed: normal No feed: do not expose a user to information about their friends sharing behavior

How to ensure the reliability?

Only consider contents shared after the start Remove URLs that may not reflect ordinary users' purposeful intentions

Experimental design --Metric

: the causal effect of exposure to information shared by friends with tie strength = , , : the quantity displayed in all users' feeds posted by friends of tie strength = 0 0

=1

()