Studying and Modeling the Connection between People's Preferences and Content Sharing

TL;DR

This study investigates the factors influencing online content sharing decisions, revealing that personal preferences often outweigh recipient preferences, and introduces a model to predict sharing behavior considering both parties' preferences.

Contribution

The paper presents a new process model of sharing that accounts for preferences and salience, and demonstrates improved prediction of sharing behavior using this model.

Findings

Preference for an item dominates over recipient's preferences.

People attempt to personalize sharing based on recipients.

Sharing prediction models improve accuracy when incorporating both sender and recipient preferences.

Abstract

People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to understand how people make their sharing decisions. We find that even when sharing to a specific individual, people's own preference for an item (individuation) dominates over the recipient's preferences (altruism). People's open-ended responses about how they share, however, indicate that they do try to personalize shares based on the recipient. To explain these contrasting results, we propose a novel process model of sharing that takes into account people's preferences and the salience of an item. We also present encouraging results for a sharing prediction model that incorporates both the senders' and the recipients' preferences. These results suggest improvements to both algorithms that support sharing in social media and to information diffusion models.