Related papers: Simple contagion drives population-scale platform …
The collective behaviour of people adopting an innovation, product or online service is commonly interpreted as a spreading phenomenon throughout the fabric of society. This process is arguably driven by social influence, social learning…
Complex networks have been successfully used to describe the spread of diseases in populations of interacting individuals. Conversely, pairwise interactions are often not enough to characterize social contagion processes such as opinion…
Modifiable health behaviors, a leading cause of illness and death in many countries, are often driven by individual beliefs and sentiments about health and disease. Individual behaviors affecting health outcomes are increasingly modulated…
Many network contagion processes are inherently multiplex in nature, yet are often reduced to processes on uniplex networks in analytic practice. We therefore examine how data modeling choices can affect the predictions of contagion…
The spread of ideas, behaviors, and technologies generally depends on feedback mechanisms operating across multiple scales. Previous studies have extensively examined pairwise transmission and local reinforcement. However, the role of…
Bluesky is a nascent Twitter-like and decentralized social media network with novel features and unprecedented data access. This paper provides a characterization of its interaction network, studying the political leaning, polarization,…
Microblogging is a crucial mode of online communication. However, launching a new microblogging platform remains challenging, largely due to network effects. This has resulted in entrenched (and undesirable) dominance by established…
This study examines the shift in the scientific community from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics (altmetrics). Analyzing 10,174 publications from multidisciplinary…
Understanding and predicting user behavior on social media platforms is crucial for content recommendation and platform design. While existing approaches focus primarily on common actions like retweeting and liking, the prediction of rare…
Only a fast and global transformation towards decarbonization and sustainability can keep the Earth in a civilization-friendly state. As hotspots for (green) innovation and experimentation, cities could play an important role in this…
Individuals engaging on social media often tend to establish online communities where interactions predominantly occur among like-minded peers. While considerable efforts have been devoted to studying and delineating these communities,…
News consumption on social media has become ubiquitous, yet how different forms of engagement shape psychosocial outcomes remains unclear. To address this gap, we leveraged a large-scale dataset of ~26M posts and ~45M comments on the…
The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the…
This study investigates the rapid growth and evolving network structure of Bluesky from August 2023 to February 2025. Through multiple waves of user migrations, the platform has reached a stable, persistently active user base. The growth…
Amid the migration of academics from X, the social media platform Bluesky has emerged as a potential alternative. To assess its viability and relevance for science communication, this study presents the first large-scale analysis of…
When exposed to a contagion phenomenon, individuals may respond to the perceived risk of infection by adopting behavioral changes, aiming to reduce their exposure or their risk of infecting others. The social cost of such adaptive behaviors…
Understanding nonlinear social contagion dynamics on dynamical networks, such as opinion formation, is crucial for gaining new insights into consensus and polarization. Similar to threshold-dependent complex contagions, the nonlinearity in…
Threshold-driven models and game theory are two fundamental paradigms for describing human interactions in social systems. However, in mimicking social contagion processes, models that simultaneously incorporate these two mechanisms have…
The adoption of individual behavioural patterns is largely determined by stimuli arriving from peers via social interactions or from external sources. Based on these influences, individuals are commonly assumed to follow simple or complex…
Most models of social contagion take peer exposure to be a corollary of adoption, yet in many settings, the visibility of one's adoption behavior happens through a separate decision process. In online systems, product designers can define…