Targeting friends to induce social contagion can benefit the world, says new research
May 2024, phys.org
The study evaluated a strategy that exploits the so-called "friendship paradox" of human social networks. That theory suggests that on average, your friends have more friends than you do. As the theory goes, the individuals nominated as friends potentially wield more social influence than those who identify them.For the study, the researchers utilized the friendship paradox in the delivery of a proven 22-month education package promoting maternal, child, and neonatal health in 176 isolated villages in Honduras.The researchers found that delivering the intervention to a smaller fraction of households in each village via the friendship targeting strategy led to the same level of behavioral adoption as would have been achieved by treating all the households.People were either selected randomly within each village to receive the intervention or they were randomly chosen to nominate their friends, who were subsequently picked at random."We found that targeting people's friends for an intervention induced significant social contagion, creating cascades of beneficial health practices to people who didn't receive the intervention."For many outcomes, using the friendship-nomination targeting method to reach 20% of households in a village affected outcomes the same as administering the intervention to every household.
Yes, Facebook knows this very well.
via Yale and Temple University: Edoardo M. Airoldi et al, Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5147
Image credit: AI Art - A Gasoline Molecule - 2023
Study shows relatively low number of superspreaders responsible for large portion of misinformation on Twitter
May 2024, phys.org
10 months of data; 2,397,388 tweets; 448,103 users; parsed by low-credibility information status.A third of the low-credibility tweets had been posted by people using just 10 accounts, and just 1,000 accounts were responsible for posting approximately 70% of such tweets.
via Indiana University: Matthew R. DeVerna et al, Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302201
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