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Effective Messaging on Social Media: What Makes Online Content Go Viral?

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and test three content-based hypotheses that significantly increase message virality. We measure virality as the retweet counts of messages in a pair of real-world Twitter datasets A large dataset - UK Brexit with 51 million tweets from 2.8 million users between June 1, 2015 and May 12, 2019 and a smaller dataset - Nord Stream 2 with 516,000 tweets from 250,000 users between October 1, 2019 and October 15, 2019. We hypothesize, test and conclude that messages incorporating “negativity bias”, “causal arguments” and “threats to personal or societal core values of target audiences” singularly and jointly increase message virality on social media.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
          April 2022
          3764 pages
          ISBN:9781450390965
          DOI:10.1145/3485447
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          Published: 25 April 2022

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          Author Tags

          1. Causal Arguments
          2. Core Values
          3. Message Effectiveness
          4. Message Virality
          5. Negativity Bias

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          • US Department of Defense Minerva Initiative and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)

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          WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
          April 25 - 29, 2022
          Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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          Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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          • (2024)Masking the Bias: From Echo Chambers to Large Scale Aspect-Based Sentiment AnalysisSocial Networks Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-3-031-78538-2_19(214-225)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
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          • (2023)Exploration of Framing Biases in Polarized Online Content ConsumptionCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543873.3587534(560-564)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023

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