The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spread of information on Twitter surrounding the 2012 Higgs boson discovery, revealing complex patterns and modeling the dynamics of user interactions with high accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of social media activity during a major scientific announcement and introduces a model that accurately reproduces the observed information spreading patterns.

Findings

Non-trivial spatio-temporal activity patterns observed

Time-varying dynamics explained by proposed model

Model accurately reproduces behavior of 500,000 users

Abstract

The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21st century. In this paper we present a study of information spreading processes on Twitter before, during and after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle with the features of the elusive Higgs boson on 4th July 2012. We report evidence for non-trivial spatio-temporal patterns in user activities at individual and global level, such as tweeting, re-tweeting and replying to existing tweets. We provide a possible explanation for the observed time-varying dynamics of user activities during the spreading of this scientific "rumor". We model the information spreading in the corresponding network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery. Finally, we show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about 500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.