Investigating the structural characteristics of cascades on Tumblr

Online social network platforms provide built-in functionalities that allow users to share information through their social connections. The study of information diffusion focusses on analysing how the spread of information enables us to understand the ways that users behave and interact online. Information diffusion manifests itself on social networks in the form of cascades of information, which are structural representations of diffusion events. The characteristics of information diffusion differ between online social networks partly depending on the capabilities of each. Tumblr is an online social network platform; it allows users to reblog more than once, to add a comment with a reblog, and to delete reblogs which presents certain challenges in the study of diffusion on this network. In this paper, we will identify and address those challenges, and we will examine the effects of these functionalities on users' behaviour and consequently on the structural characteristics of cascades on Tumblr.