How Information Spreads

Information spreads fast on Facebook. We see that many social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have a resharing feature. The resharing or re-posting functionality allows users to share other people’s content with friends or followers. As social networkers, we re-share content from user to user. When we do, large cascades of reshares can form. Facebook scans and collects everything posted by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked. It begs the question—why do some pieces of content go viral while others don’t? Why are some things shared more often than others? Lada Adamic will reveal how Facebook reshares cascades are formed, and she’ll discuss how they can be predicted based on things such as the content type, author, and diffusion structure.

About the Speaker

Lada Adamic is an American network scientist, who researches information dynamics in networks. She studies how network structure influences the flow of information, how information affects the evolution of networks and crowdsourced knowledge sharing.

Adamic is an associate professor at the University of Michigan. During her sabbatical year, she worked at Facebook with the data science team. Previously she worked in Hewlett-Packard‘s Information Dynamics Lab on research projects relating to networks constructed from large data sets.
About the Video: Information spreads fast on Facebook. We see that many social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have a resharing feature. The resharing or re-posting functionality allows users to share other people’s content with friends or followers. As social networkers, we re-share content from user to user.

About the speaker
Lada Adamic Facebook, Research Scientist Manager Member

Lada A. Adamic is a data scientist at Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/data) and an associate professor in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure.

Provide your rating for this post
If you liked this post, please use the buttons to the left to share it with a friend or post it on social media. Thank you!

Leave a Reply

Read more

Behavioral Economist Kristen Berman on Using the Insights of Irrationality

Behavioral Economist and co-founder of Dan Ariely's Irrational Labs, Kristen Berman shares examples of using insights to build great products

WeChat partners with Products That Count

WeChat is kinda the Facebook of China: an addictive messaging platform like we've never seen in the West with 800M active users

Growing Pains: The Challenges of Scaling a Business

Diane Pierson discusses why startups have issues scaling and why she thinks this has confused both established businesses and startups.

Sign-in / Register for Free

Don’t be left behind in your career. Join a growing community of over 500K Product professionals committed to building great products. Register for FREE today and get access to :

  • All eBooks
  • All Infographics
  • Product Award resources
  • Search for other members

Coming soon for members only: personalized content, engagement, and networking.