12.03.

2012

Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks | Facebook

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Rethinking Information Diversit in Networks

by Eytan Bakshy on Tuesday, 17 January 2012 at 08:00 How do your friends shape the information you see and read online? Social networking technologies like Facebook let us connect to hundreds, even thousands of people -- and have fundamentally changed how people get their information. While much of our time is spent communicating with close friends about events in our personal lives [1], we also use online networks to share breaking news, discuss political issues and learn about new trends. In 2010, my colleagues Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, Lada Adamic and I conducted a study on Facebook to understand the nature of information spread in social networks. Facebook Data Team's notes Get notes via RSS Some claim that social networks act like echo chambers in which people only consume and share information from likeminded close friends, stifling the spread of diverse information. Our study paints a different picture of the world. Instead, we found that even though people are more likely to consume and share information that comes from close contacts that they interact with frequently (like discussing a photo from last nights party), the vast majority of information comes from contacts that they interact with infrequently. These distant contacts are also more likely to share novel information, demonstrating that social networks can act as a powerful medium for sharing new ideas, highlighting new products and discussing current events. The research suggests that Facebook isnt the echo chamber that some might expect online social networks may actually increase the spread of novel information and diverse viewpoints. Social Networks as Information Pathways Economic sociologist Mark Granovetter was one of the first to popularize the use of social networks in understanding the spread of information. In his seminal 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties [2], Granovetter found that surprisingly, people are more likely to acquire jobs that they learned about through individuals they interact with infrequently rather than their close personal contacts. To explain this phenomenon Granovetter used social graphs to illustrate how networks relate to information access (Figure 1). When a person interacts with two individuals frequently, those individuals are also likely to interact with one another. It follows that people tend to form dense clusters of strong ties who are all connected.

Figure 1: We are connected to core groups of strong ties that we interact with frequently and weak ties that we interact with infrequently. Granovetter's hypothesis about the "strength of weak ties" states that weak ties facilitate information flow from disparate clusters of people.

What do these structures have to do with information access? Since people in these clusters all know each other, any information that is available to one individual spreads quickly to others within the cluster. These tight-knit social circles tend to be small relative to people's entire social network, and

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when it comes to information about future job opportunities, it can be hard to find new leads. Granovetter used the relationship between interaction frequency and social structure to explain why information about jobs is instead found through eak ties that we interact with infrequently. Weak ties help spread novel information by bridging the gap between clusters of strong tie contacts. The strength of weak ties informs much of the popular understanding of information spread in social networks. Birds of a Feather Surf Together But what about information that is more widely available, like news on the Internet? To understand the flow of more general types of information in society, its important not only to take into account how people are connected, but also the commonalities that promote the spread of information. One of the most robust findings in social networks is that of homophily [3], the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to associate with one another. Individuals are connected to each other through workplaces, professions, schools, clubs, hobbies, political beliefs and other affiliations. The homophily principle holds true for any kind of social network you can think of: close friends, professional contacts, classmates and even the people you ride the bus with. Today, these commonalities not only shape how often people interact and what they talk about, but also what kinds of information they as individuals seek on the Web. Homophily suggests that people who interact frequently are similar and may consume more of the same information. Individuals that interact less often tend to be dissimilar and may consume more diverse information. This view of the world is illustrated in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Information spread in online social networks. Our study suggests that strong ties are similar and more likely to be tuned into the same web sites. Weak ties, being more dissimilar, tend to visit different websites. Interest and Novelty To understand how online social networks affect the spread of information, we used random variation in the News Feed to determine how likely a person is to share Web content if she did or did not see the content shared by her friends. We found that people are more likely to share the information they were exposed to by their strong ties than by their weak ties on Facebook (Figure 3).

Figure 3: People are more likely to share information (links to Web pages) that they were exposed to by strong ties in their News Feed [4]. Tie strength between two individuals is measured by the number

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of comments a person received from their friend on Facebook. Other measurements of tie strength, like the number of messages, co-appearances in photos, and discussion on posts are discussed in our paper [5]. There are many possible explanations for the increased flow of information across strong ties. One reason is that close contacts are more likely to be similar to one another, and therefore find content shared by their close friends more interesting. An alternative explanation is that strong ties are more "influential", so that people are more likely to be persuaded to share information from their close contacts. We also investigate how Facebook amplifies information distribution. That is, if a friend shares something on Facebook, how many times more likely are you to share that information as a result of seeing it in the News Feed? The figure below shows how this multiplicative effect depends on the strength of your tie with that friend.

Figure 4: Weak ties spread novel information that people are unlikely to otherwise see. The figure above shows how many times more likely people are to share a page because of exposure via the News Feed from strong and weak ties. We found that information shared by a person's weak ties is unlikely to be shared at a later point in time independently of those friends. Therefore, seeing content from a weak tie leads to a nearly tenfold increase in the likelihood that a person will share a link. In contrast, seeing information shared by a strong tie in News Feed makes people just six times as likely to share. In short, weak ties have the greatest potential to expose their friends to information that they would not have otherwise discovered. The Collective Influence of Weak Ties Ultimately, we are interested in how these network effects shape information spread as a whole. Even though a person is more likely to share a single piece of information from one of their close contacts, it turns out that weak ties are collectively responsible for the majority of information spread. Let's consider a hypothetical example (illustrated in Figure 5). Let's say a person has 100 contacts that are weak tie friends, and 10 that are strong tie friends. Suppose the chance that you'll share something is very high for strong tie friends, say 50%, but the weak tie friends tend to share less interesting stuff, so the likelihood of sharing is only 15%. Therefore the amount of information spread due to weak and strong ties would be 100*0.15 = 15, and 10*0.50 = 5 respectively, so in total, people would end up sharing more from their weak tie friends.

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Figure 5: People are more likely to share information from their strong ties, but because of their abundance, weak ties are primarily responsible for the majority of information spread on Facebook. The figure above illustrates how a majority of influence (orange) can be generated by weak ties, even if strong ties are individually more influential.

It turns out that the mathematics of information spread on Facebook is quite similar to our hypothetical example: the majority of peoples contacts are weak tie friends, and if we carry out this same computation using the empirical distribution of tie strengths and their corresponding probabilities, we find that weak ties generate the majority of information spread. Conclusion The information we consume and share on Facebook is actually much more diverse in nature than conventional wisdom might suggest. We are exposed to and spread more information from our distant contacts than our close friends. Since these distant contacts tend to be different from us, the bulk of information we consume and share comes from people with different perspectives. This may provide some comfort to those who worry that social networks are simply an echo chamber where people are only exposed to those who share the same opinions. Our work is among the first to rigorously quantify influence at a mass scale, and shows that online social networks can serve as an important medium for sharing new perspectives, products and world events. Footnotes [1] Common experience would suggest that we spend most of our time communicating with only a few individuals on Facebook. To a large extent, this is true, and documented in Backstrom, et al. Center of Attention: How Facebook Users allocate Attention. ICWSM, 2011. [2] M. Granovetter. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 1973. [3] An extensive and accessible introduction to homophily can be found in McPherson et al. Birds of a Feather Flock Together. Annual Review of Sociology, 2001. [4] It is important to note that very often, information does not "cascade" very far along the network. This phenomenon has been observed in earlier research on Twitter in Everyone's an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter and has been studied across other networks more extensively in upcoming work by Sharad Goel and Duncan Watts at Yahoo! Research, NY. [5] The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion. E. Bakshy, I. Rosenn, C.A. Marlow, L.A. Adamic, ACM WWW 2012 Like Comment Share Elik Rozenboim, Avin Remorseless, Yash Garg and 2,945 others like this. 1,876 shares Horacio Rubn Cugnata Mark, es estupendo tu desempeo como el de todo tu equipo. A pesar de tener casi 60 aos de edad, sueo con poder algn da antes de morir, poder colaborar con todo este avance con algunas tomas fotogrficas, actividad que es mi gran pasin. Un abrazo y gracias por la herramienta que nos brinds. See Translation 29 February at 18:09 4

Bijay Kumar Thapa FB FB FB a new mantra of 21st century.I just can't stop loving it...great work. 1 March at 03:35 Marcelo Rafael Orfali interesting topic and analysis... 1 March at 08:00 2 Olawunmi Babajide This is great info.

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1 March at 09:23 2

Miller Zsolt ez tant 2 March at 02:25 2 Mahender Singh yup... this is nice information. 2 March at 02:47 1 Doug Wilson this may explain the 2 March at 09:54 2 John Guerra i agree and thank you for the information. More please :) 2 March at 13:21 1 Dave Soysal das ist eine sehr gute information :D See Translation 2 March at 15:27 Orlino Flores trying to see and understand the others perspectives. Good luck to all and World Peace profound 3 March at 03:08 Andrei Petrache interesting topic !! 3 March at 06:28 Yacine Beztout See Translation 3 March at 12:02 2

Shugy Wahid Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, I have an idea. what if facebook has its own, or make a live TV link and connected on facebook ... FBTV? 4 March at 02:45 1 Zaen Elhasn Makasih atas info nya 4 March at 07:24 2 Abdennour Hmd very useful information thank you 4 March at 13:46 1 Cameron Mcleod does this info take into consideration how much is actually force fed to us by whatever media outlet we might find our self on at the time? Take SOPA and ACTA fpr example an issue that facebook took no stance on tilll it was dead in the wat... S ee more 4 March at 15:23 1 Kelvin Contor Dengler vary cool... 5 March at 02:34 1 William Bowman :/ 5 March at 09:52 1 Darren J Nikolai Socialist party, streaming live via Facebook. very good. 5 March at 10:09 1 Leona Hines Mark Please remove the ads Im gettin on my Wall. They are already on my right side. No they are invading my WALL. Please remove them and stop this from happening! Thanks!! 5 March at 11:49 1 Gabella Erzsbet Hi, Mark! The network of construction-related comments, suddenly I remembered that during the past few days. Bulk user Block 7-14-30 is not a good day is not facebook, twitter, Netlog will not be used as such for the purpose of acquaintance... S ee more 5 March at 22:09 2 Elena V Kudlay thanks! and our desire to take in information - results in the increase of speed of her receipt. what is assisted by looselycoupled interfaces 6 March at 09:45 1 Kristi Sharp This supports our hypothisis. 6 March at 14:52 1 Jenny Liew haha 6 March at 22:27

Ron Harter But facebook is doing nothing with the many commercial "HATE" pages out there which contradict the purpose of facebook social network concept. People report them and facebook does nothing... SAD! 7 March at 11:28 1 Kuan Shen Hm...anyway, i can feel that Mark Zuckerberg & the facebook team will have a bigger plan in future that can overcome all these.

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7 March at 23:40 1

Enrique Garc a de Gabiola See also Janis (1972) "Group Thinking". Probably assessing close contacts vs distant ones could offer a nice clue for assessing FB profiles' "Innovative Information Ratings" . More comments inside, see also Diigo. 8 March at 11:00 1 Som Gupta Personally I have found over time,some time instantly,many ideas and feelings common with distant 'friends' on Facebook and they are now closer to me than my close contacts who are still dear to me though I see them in new light, yes in GL... S ee more 8 March at 11:48 1 Newsbad Johnson Facebook is a closed network. It doesnt allow for meeting new people. The article is complete BS facebook propaganda. In fact, quite the opposite is true -- facebook simply an echo chamber where people are only exposed to those who share ... S ee more 8 March at 16:08 2 Newsbad Johnson myspace died when it started to block users from posting content. bands, models, and interesting people who were promoting their websites lost interest. once the site becomes impossible with captchas and those sound captchas, people will simply not bother to post as much if not at all 8 March at 16:27 2 Enrique Garc a de Gabiola Is there available any app to show weak vs strong connections in FB's profiles? 8 March at 21:57 1 Ahsan Ch It Becoming stronger and stronger Day By Day the :++FB++:: Friday at 04:10 1 Godwin Dzvapatsva Used in almost all circles of life Friday at 11:46 1 Amine Akh Facebook contribute to create golden mines through new relations in this worldwide connection. lot of opportunities ahead, to share and learn more from each other... Namaste. Friday at 16:49 Jeffrey Salthouse Excellent analysis, couldn't be more acurate or timely. Friday at 19:25 Akatsuki Sai Im an IT student, and i'm willing to work with Zuckerberg someday or make a social network like him.. but im not ready yet.. still working with the basic.. Yes, I love fb! This is a useful tool, please let us use it in a right way! Saturday at 08:39 Kim Deleon How much fun are you having Mark?!? lol.......How genius to have invented the greatest worldwide socialization tool, and then get to perform and report on your findings of it's success!!! I personally, Love Facebook!! Thanks Saturday at 15:57 1 Rabi Lith great information. I just love facebook, amazing platform to connect ppl. Great invention Mark, Thanks. Saturday at 19:03 Aime Ann Grober Yeah, great invention, MARK. Yesterday at 05:35 Henrey Militar age osf social media... indeed Yesterday at 08:49 Vinay Chandratre if you want to create a world without boundaries , then such methods should be avoided. Everyone should be herd and seen by every one. to be the king one has to make a FACEBOOK page that puts all the content marked "global" on that page automatically. it will be difficult , but you can categorise and publish on this page. about an hour ago

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