Co-Diffusion of Competing Memes in Social Networks

The rise of online social networks has intensified competition for our limited attention, particularly among ideas, innovations, rumors, and what we collectively refer to as memes. In this highly competitive landscape, some memes emerge from obscurity to dominate niche information spaces, while many others fail to rise above the noise. Most previous studies have either modeled meme contagion independently or focused on specific types of networks. In contrast, we present a unified model that simultaneously depicts the competition between two memes within the same network. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to establish a ubiquitous epidemic threshold for competing memes, effectively decoupling the influence of the meme competition model from network topology. Utilizing this epidemic threshold, we develop an effective predictor that accurately forecasts the outcomes of meme competition. The findings of this study hold significant implications for online campaigns and mobilizations, as well as for combating misinformation.