Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagement.

As virality has become increasingly central in shaping information sources' strategies, it raises concerns about its consequences for society, particularly when referring to the impact of viral news on the public discourse. Nonetheless, there has been little consideration of whether these viral events genuinely boost the attention received by the source. To address this gap, we analyze content timelines from over 1000 European news outlets from 2018 to 2023 on Facebook and YouTube, employing a Bayesian structural time series model to evaluate the impact of viral posts.

Followers do not dictate the virality of news outlets on social media.

Initially conceived for entertainment, social media platforms have profoundly transformed the dissemination of information and consequently reshaped the dynamics of agenda-setting. In this scenario, understanding the factors that capture audience attention and drive viral content is crucial. Employing Gibrat's Law, which posits that an entity's growth rate is unrelated to its size, we examine the engagement growth dynamics of news outlets on social media.

Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time.

Growing concern surrounds the impact of social media platforms on public discourse and their influence on social dynamics, especially in the context of toxicity. Here, to better understand these phenomena, we use a comparative approach to isolate human behavioural patterns across multiple social media platforms. In particular, we analyse conversations in different online communities, focusing on identifying consistent patterns of toxic content.

Cross-platform social dynamics: an analysis of ChatGPT and COVID-19 vaccine conversations.

The role of social media in information dissemination and agenda-setting has significantly expanded in recent years. By offering real-time interactions, online platforms have become invaluable tools for studying societal responses to significant events as they unfold. However, online reactions to external developments are influenced by various factors, including the nature of the event and the online environment.

Characterizing engagement dynamics across topics on Facebook.

Social media platforms heavily changed how users consume and digest information and, thus, how the popularity of topics evolves. In this paper, we explore the interplay between the virality of controversial topics and how they may trigger heated discussions and eventually increase users' polarization. We perform a quantitative analysis on Facebook by collecting ∼57M posts from ∼2M pages and groups between 2018 and 2022, focusing on engaging topics involving scandals, tragedies, and social and political issues.