How Visibility and Divided Attention Constrain Social Contagion

How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect information diffusion in online social networks, including: the novelty of information, users' activity levels, who they pay attention to, and how they respond to friends' recommendations. Using URLs as markers of information, we carry out a detailed study of retweeting, the primary mechanism by which information spreads on the Twitter follower graph. Our empirical study examines how users respond to an incoming stimulus, i.e., a tweet (message) from a friend, and reveals that dynamically decaying visibility, which is the increasing cognitive effort required for discovering and acting upon a tweet, combined with limited attention play dominant roles in retweeting behavior. Specifically, we observe that users retweet information when it is most visible, such as when it near the top of their Twitter feed. Moreover, our measurements quantify how a user's limited attention is divided among incoming tweets, providing novel evidence that highly connected individuals are less likely to propagate an arbitrary tweet. Our study indicates that the finite ability to process incoming information constrains social contagion, and we conclude that rapid decay of visibility is the primary barrier to information propagation online.