Diffusion of multiple information: On information resilience and the power of segregation

Abstract

We introduce two pieces of information, denoted memes, into a diffusion process in which memes are transmitted when individuals meet and forgotten at an exogenous rate. At most one meme can be transmitted at a meeting, which introduces opportunity costs in the process. Individuals differ according to which meme they find more interesting, and that is the one they transmit if they face a choice. We find that both memes survive under the same parameter values, and that relative interest is the main determinant in the number of people informed of a meme in the long run. We apply our framework to analyze the impact of segregation and find that segregation leads to polarization. Segregation also reduces the overall number of people informed in the long run. Our final set of results shows that agents are more likely to prefer segregation if their information preferences are more extreme, if they have few social contacts, or if they prefer a meme that is preferred by only a small fraction of the population.Since the seminal work of Lazarsfeld et al. (1948) and Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), the importance of social networks in the diffusion of information has been well documented. It is less well known how different pieces of information, or memes, 1 interact in this diffusion process. In the production of news, such as in print or TV media, it is obvious that fixed coverage space is shared by different news stories. 2 In the social diffusion process, a similar constraint is present: Communication time is limited and has to be shared among everything an individual talks about. Making use of Twitter data, Leskovec et al. (2009) and Weng et al. (2012) have shown that the total volume of tweets is roughly constant over time, despite significant variation in the topics of tweets. In addition, their data shows that (i) at any point in time numerous hashtags diffuse simultaneously, (ii) there are significant differences in the number of times as hashtag is retweeted, and (iii) hashtags crowd each other out. Diffusion models of a unique information are not equipped to explain these patterns. The present paper introduces a parsimonious diffusion model of multiple memes under a communication constraint, which reproduces the above patterns. To keep the analysis tractable and to isolate the effect of limited communication time, we build on a standard diffusion process with epidemiological roots, the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) framework. 3 In the model, each period each agent randomly meets a subset of other agents. At any meeting, there is a chance that communication occurs, in which case an informed agent passes a meme on. Agents forget memes at an exogenous rate. The novelty of our process lies in the existence of two memes. At each meeting, if communication occurs, each agent can pass on only one meme. Within the model, the choice of what to talk about is determined by intrinsic information preferences of agents, capturing the idea that individuals are more likely to talk about things that interest them more.Within a m...

Resiliência informacional: revisão da literatura e agenda de pesquisa

“…Uma vez que, nas pesquisas desse campo, a resiliência pode estar atrelada tanto às possibilidades de criação e acesso aos recursos informacionais importantes para vida em sociedade e disputas democráticas, de um ponto de vista positivo (Damarad, 2020). Quanto aos desafios envolvidos nesse processo, destacando que o aumento da disponibilidade de dados e a facilitação do processo de transmissão de informações também resultam em tensões associadas à elevação do risco de desinformação, segregação, processos de ajustamento disfuncionais e ampliação do espaço de controvérsia válida a partir de informações enviesadas, preconceituosas e implausíveis (Hopp;Ferrucci, 2020;Tabasso, 2019;Patent, 2022).…”