Physics of tweets: scientists studying the mechanisms of propagation of information
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Where did the news about the dangers of vaccinations come from, and the news about the problems with Volkswagen engines? How has this message changed on the way to us? Why do some news spread fast in the media, while others do not? Scientists including researchers from Stanford University are trying to determine this in a project coordinated by the Poles.
What was the source of information later spread by other media? What made a tweet become the point of interest of the whole community, while other, more important voices in social media were ignored? The phenomenon of propagation of information in the modern media is an area of interdisciplinary research in which physicists also participate.
In September, the European Commission granted funding for the project RENOIR - Reverse EngiNeering of sOcial Information processing, coordinated by the Warsaw University of Technology.
"The reverse engineering is, for example, when we disassemble a computer into components to understand how they work and how they were made. Knowledge obtained in this way is often used to create a competitive model with better performance, or allows to achieve compatibility with other products (printers or Wi-Fi routers)" - he said in an interview with PAP coordinator of the project, Prof. Janusz Hołyst from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw. – In the project RENOIR we will reverse engineer information processing in various types of modern media".
The participation of Stanford University in the project will allow to gain access to large collection of data from social networks, and Slovenian Press Agency will provide more than 2 million pre-processed data from an archive of newspaper articles. The research will cover mainly English-language texts.
"We want not only to create a model of the information propagation in the media, but also develop methods for finding the place in which the message first appeared. We would like to understand why the information was carried via specific channels, why we came across it and how it changed on its way to us. The transfer of information is not only clean copying, but also information processing. This process is only partially organized and controlled by specialized institutions - to a large extent it is a spontaneous activity of billions of participants in social media. Social media create evolving socio-technical systems; for several years they have been studied using methods of physics of complex networks and statistical data analysis" - noted Prof. Hołyst.
He used the example of an interview with PAP to explain the information control process. "PAP may or may not publish an interview with me. It may be published as an important topic, the topic of the day, or an article with lower significance. And that is information control" - he admitted. He added that, in turn, when a message appears on Twitter, each user decides whether to re-tweet the message or not. The recipient can also send a message that contains a malformed content of the original information. "The daily number of individual decisions on whether to post information on social media already exceeds one billion, on Twitter alone there are hundreds of millions of tweets every day, from which tens of millions are passed on in its original form to further recipients. It is difficult to estimate how many messages are transmitted as processed information" - described the physicist. Social media now play a huge role in our daily lives, culture, advertising and political marketing, so the development of tools to recover the original information (and its sources) would be of importance to society.
Prof. Hołyst spoke about other potential applications of research that he would coordinate. "It happens that an important message, for example about software vulnerability or fault in a car is jammed, even blocked in the information space. Society has a right to full information" - said the researcher. He admitted that the research could also help in the analysis of false messages, for example pseudoscientific messages that could be harmful to society. "Better identification of mechanisms of information propagation in various media will allow to understand the reasons for the mass propagation of malicious rumours, for example about so-called miraculous drugs or other pseudo-discoveries" - said the physicist.
In addition to Warsaw University of Technology, the project participants will include: Stanford University (USA), Institut Jozef Stefan (Slovenia), Wrocław University of Technology, Slovenian Press Agency, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). The cost of the project is over 1.3 million euros. The programme MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION STAFF EXCHANGE (MSCA-RISE) allows to finance scientists from the EU and countries outside Europe and transfer knowledge between academia and business partners. Anticipated visits include 98 months stay of Warsaw University of Technology employees and doctoral students in partner institutions and 13 months of partners’ stay at Warsaw University of Technology.
This is not the first project coordinated by Prof. Janusz Hołyst concerning the propagation of information in the media. His previous project "Cyberemotions" concerned the spread of emotion over the network, also in online comments.
PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland, Ludwika Tomala
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