Properties of Reddit News Topical Interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the role of interactions between Reddit news headlines in their dissemination process, finding that such interactions have a minor impact in the analyzed dataset of 100,000 headlines from 2019.

Contribution

The study applies and extends a recent interaction-aware model to Reddit news headlines, providing empirical evidence on the limited influence of interactions in news dissemination.

Findings

Interactions play a minor role in Reddit news headline dissemination.

The dataset comprised 100,000 headlines from 2019.

State-of-the-art models can be effectively applied to social media data.

Abstract

Most models of information diffusion online rely on the assumption that pieces of information spread independently from each other. However, several works pointed out the necessity of investigating the role of interactions in real-world processes, and highlighted possible difficulties in doing so: interactions are sparse and brief. As an answer, recent advances developed models to account for interactions in underlying publication dynamics. In this article, we propose to extend and apply one such model to determine whether interactions between news headlines on Reddit play a significant role in their underlying publication mechanisms. After conducting an in-depth case study on 100,000 news headline from 2019, we retrieve state-of-the-art conclusions about interactions and conclude that they play a minor role in this dataset.