Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information

TL;DR

This paper models how limited individual attention and information overload on social media can lead to the viral spread of low-quality information, showing that quality is weakly correlated with popularity in realistic scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a stylized model demonstrating how attention limitations and overload impair quality discrimination, aligning with empirical data on social media virality.

Findings

Limited attention reduces quality discrimination in information spread.

Overload and attention constraints weaken the link between quality and popularity.

High-quality information gains little advantage over low-quality content under realistic conditions.

Abstract

Social media are massive marketplaces where ideas and news compete for our attention. Previous studies have shown that quality is not a necessary condition for online virality and that knowledge about peer choices can distort the relationship between quality and popularity. However, these results do not explain the viral spread of low-quality information, such as the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy. We investigate quality discrimination in a stylized model of online social network, where individual agents prefer quality information, but have behavioral limitations in managing a heavy flow of information. We measure the relationship between the quality of an idea and its likelihood to become prevalent at the system level. We find that both information overload and limited attention contribute to a degradation in the market's discriminative power. A good tradeoff between discriminative power and diversity of information is possible according to the model. However, calibration with empirical data characterizing information load and finite attention in real social media reveals a weak correlation between quality and popularity of information. In these realistic conditions, the model predicts that high-quality information has little advantage over low-quality information.