📢Join us for a public lecture by @walter4c.bsky.social about the impacts of social media on society.

⛓️‍💥For online attendants, please register here: bit.ly/3FomgkF

6/ Curious about the details?
Read the full paper here: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We hope this sparks new conversations about the value of attention in the digital age.

Let us know your thoughts! 💬

5/ 💡 What does this mean?
In the attention economy, chasing virality is risky. Instead, building consistent, sustained engagement is key to forming lasting connections with users.

4/ Rapid viral effects fade quickly, while slower, gradual processes last longer.
This suggests that collective attention is elastic and influenced by pre-existing engagement trends.

A "like" or viral post is often fleeting—it doesn’t guarantee long-term impact.

3/ Key findings:

Viral events rarely lead to sustained growth in engagement.
We identified two types of virality:
1️⃣ "Loaded" virality: The final burst after a growth phase, followed by a decline.
2️⃣ "Sudden" virality: Unexpected events that briefly reactivate user attention.

2/ 📊 We analyzed over 1000 European news outlets on Facebook & YouTube (2018-2023), using a Bayesian structural time series model.

Our goal: Understand the impact of viral posts on user engagement, from short-term spikes to long-term trends.

1/ 🎉 First paper of 2025!

In the quantitative study of the attention economy, we asked a key question:
How much does a like—or a viral post—truly reverberate?

Our new study, published in Scientific Reports, dives into this crucial topic. 🧵

A follow-up to this Nature paper (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)
has just been published in PNAS:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

5/ Implications:
What does this mean for the future of language?
Simplification can democratize communication but risks impoverishing public debate and cultural diversity.
How can we balance accessibility with complexity?

4/ The role of platforms:
Social media business models incentivize short, emotional, and easily shareable content.
The result? Simpler but less rich language, shaped by the rules of engagement.

3/ Why it matters:
Simplification of language may affect how we articulate and share ideas.
Fewer words = fewer nuances?
👉 A risk for public debate, but also an adaptation to the digital age.

2/ Key findings:

Language has simplified: shorter texts and less diverse vocabulary.
Users continue to innovate, introducing new terms at a steady pace.
These changes are platform-agnostic: a near-universal phenomenon.

1/ What we did:
We collected 300 million English comments from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Telegram, covering data from 1990 to today.
We measured:
Lexical richness
Text length
Introduction of new words

Breaking News! Our latest paper has just been published in PNAS! 📄
We analyzed 34 years of data a cross 8 social media platforms to uncover how language has evolved in the digital age.
👉 Read the paper here www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

5/ This segregation reshapes the digital public sphere, amplifies polarization, and limits dialogue across ideological divides.
Our study provides a quantitative framework to understand these dynamics and inform policies to mitigate their societal impact.

4/ 📊 Our analysis on 126M URLs shared by 6M users,9 platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit (mainstream) & Gab, Parler, BitChute (alt-tech).
Alt-tech platforms are niches of ideological homogeneity & questionable content.
Mainstream platforms are diverse but internally polarized.

3/ 🔬 We developed a framework to measure this fragmentation using three dimensions:
1️⃣ Centrality: Are platforms central or peripheral in the information ecosystem?
2️⃣ Content reliability: Reliable vs questionable news.
3️⃣ User base: Diverse vs homogeneous communities.

2/ Humans naturally group with like-minded peers. On social media, this tendency drives segregation, not just within communities but at the scale of entire platforms.
We call this phenomenon Echo Platforms—platforms where ideological uniformity dominates.

1/ 🚨 New preprint on arXiv 🚨
"Characterizing the Fragmentation of the Social Media Ecosystem" arxiv.org/abs/2411.16826
@matteo_cinelli
,
@m_starnini
edoardo di martino Alessandro Galeazzi #echoplatforms #fragmentation

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