ArticleNature communications2022
Universality, criticality and complexity of information propagation in social media.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Integrating behavioural experimental findings into dynamical models to inform social change interventions.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Characterizing Information Propagation in Social Media with Branching Processes.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Rumor propagation on hypergraphs.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Exploring Temporal Asymmetry in Human Behavior in Social Media Platforms.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Collective dynamics behind success.Nature communications · 2024Review
- Article
- Criticality and universality in neuronal cultures during "up" and "down" states.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Statistical laws of information avalanches in social media appear, at least according to existing empirical studies, not robust across systems. As a consequence, radically different processes may represent plausible driving mechanisms for information propagation. Here, we analyze almost one billion time-stamped events collected from several online platforms - including Telegram, Twitter and Weibo - over observation windows longer than ten years, and show that the propagation of information in social media is a universal and critical process. Universality arises from the observation of identical macroscopic patterns across platforms, irrespective of the details of the specific system at hand. Critical behavior is deduced from the power-law distributions, and corresponding hyperscaling relations, characterizing size and duration of avalanches of information. Statistical testing on our data indicates that a mixture of simple and complex contagion characterizes the propagation of information in social media. Data suggest that the complexity of the process is correlated with the semantic content of the information that is propagated.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.