Facebook is flooded by diverse and heterogeneous content, from kittens up to music and news, passing through satirical and funny stories. Each piece of that corpus reflects the heterogeneity of the underlying social background. In the Italian Facebook we have found an interesting case: a page having more than 40K followers that every day posts the same picture of a popular Italian singer. In this work, we use such a page as a control to study and model the relationship between content heterogeneity on popularity. In particular, we use that page for a comparative analysis of information consumption patterns with respect to pages posting science and conspiracy news. In total, we analyze about 2M likes and 190K comments, made by approximately 340K and 65K users, respectively. We conclude the paper by introducing a model mimicking users selection preferences accounting for the heterogeneity of contents.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1501.07201,
title = {Everyday the Same Picture: Popularity and Content Diversity},
author = {Alessandro Bessi and Fabiana Zollo and Michela Del Vicario and Antonio Scala and Fabio Petroni and Bruno Gonçalves and Walter Quattrociocchi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.07201},
year = {2015}
}