The role of hidden influentials in the diffusion of online information cascades

TL;DR

This paper investigates how hidden influentials, rather than hubs, drive the spread of information cascades on Twitter, revealing their crucial role in complex contagion dynamics across social media.

Contribution

It identifies the significant influence of hidden influentials in information diffusion, contrasting with the traditional focus on hubs, and analyzes their role in time-constrained cascades.

Findings

Cascade sizes follow a fat-tailed distribution.

Hidden influentials are key to system-wide cascades.

Hubs often act as barriers to information spread.

Abstract

In a diversified context with multiple social networking sites, heterogeneous activity patterns and different user-user relations, the concept of "information cascade" is all but univocal. Despite the fact that such information cascades can be defined in different ways, it is important to check whether some of the observed patterns are common to diverse contagion processes that take place on modern social media. Here, we explore one type of information cascades, namely, those that are time-constrained, related to two kinds of socially-rooted topics on Twitter. Specifically, we show that in both cases cascades sizes distribute following a fat tailed distribution and that whether or not a cascade reaches system-wide proportions is mainly given by the presence of so-called hidden influentials. These latter nodes are not the hubs, which on the contrary, often act as firewalls for information spreading. Our results are important for a better understanding of the dynamics of complex contagion and, from a practical side, for the identification of efficient spreaders in viral phenomena.