The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence

TL;DR

This paper explores how susceptibility to online influence varies in social networks, revealing a paradox where users' friends are often more susceptible, especially in influence-driven behaviors, impacting misinformation spread and moderation strategies.

Contribution

It extends the Generalized Friendship Paradox to influence behaviors, demonstrating the predictive power of friends' susceptibility and highlighting differences between influence-driven and spontaneous adoption.

Findings

Influence-driven adoption shows high homophily among susceptible users.

Users' friends are generally more susceptible to influence than the users themselves.

Susceptibility to influence can be predicted from friends' susceptibility alone.

Abstract

Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the differential effects of influence-driven versus spontaneous behaviors on user content adoption. Our analysis reveals that influence-driven adoption exhibits high homophily, indicating that individuals prone to influence often connect with similarly susceptible peers, thereby reinforcing peer influence dynamics, whereas spontaneous adoption shows significant but lower homophily. Additionally, we extend the Generalized Friendship Paradox to influence-driven behaviors, demonstrating that users' friends are generally more susceptible to influence than the users themselves, de facto establishing the notion of Susceptibility Paradox in online social influence. This pattern does not hold for spontaneous behaviors, where friends exhibit fewer spontaneous adoptions. We find that susceptibility to influence can be predicted using friends' susceptibility alone, while predicting spontaneous adoption requires additional features, such as user metadata. These findings highlight the complex interplay between user engagement and characteristics in spontaneous content adoption. Our results provide new insights into social influence mechanisms and offer implications for designing more effective moderation strategies to protect vulnerable audiences.