The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Luceri, Luca, Ye, Jinyi, Jiang, Julie, Ferrara, Emilio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Luceri, Luca
Ye, Jinyi
Jiang, Julie
Ferrara, Emilio
author_facet Luceri, Luca
Ye, Jinyi
Jiang, Julie
Ferrara, Emilio
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11553
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence
Luceri, Luca
Ye, Jinyi
Jiang, Julie
Ferrara, Emilio
Social and Information Networks
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.
title The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11553