Walter Quattrociocchi

Impact of Social Media on Society by Walter Quattrociocchi at the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University

📢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

Evaluating the effect of viral posts on social media engagement - Scientific Reports 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 o...

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. 🧵

Patterns of linguistic simplification on social media platforms over time | PNAS Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinfor...

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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