Video Pandemics: Worldwide Viral Spreading of Psy's Gangnam Style Video

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the global spread of viral videos like Psy's Gangnam Style, demonstrating wave-like propagation patterns through weighted air-travel and communication networks, with implications for understanding meme virality.

Contribution

It introduces a method to measure propagation in social media and communication networks using weighted distances, revealing wave-like spread patterns similar to disease transmission.

Findings

Wave-like propagation observed in Twitter data

Similar patterns found in Google Trends data

Non-local spreading effects analyzed

Abstract

Viral videos can reach global penetration traveling through international channels of communication similarly to real diseases starting from a well-localized source. In past centuries, disease fronts propagated in a concentric spatial fashion from the the source of the outbreak via the short range human contact network. The emergence of long-distance air-travel changed these ancient patterns. However, recently, Brockmann and Helbing have shown that concentric propagation waves can be reinstated if propagation time and distance is measured in the flight-time and travel volume weighted underlying air-travel network. Here, we adopt this method for the analysis of viral meme propagation in Twitter messages, and define a similar weighted network distance in the communication network connecting countries and states of the World. We recover a wave-like behavior on average and assess the randomizing effect of non-locality of spreading. We show that similar result can be recovered from Google Trends data as well.