Abstract

Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the differential effects of influence-driven versus spontaneous behaviors on user content adoption. Our analysis reveals that influence-driven adoption exhibits high homophily, indicating that individuals prone to influence often connect with similarly susceptible peers, thereby reinforcing peer influence dynamics, whereas spontaneous adoption shows significant but lower homophily. Additionally, we extend the Generalized Friendship Paradox to influence-driven behaviors, demonstrating that users' friends are generally more susceptible to influence than the users themselves, de facto establishing the notion of Susceptibility Paradox in online social influence. This pattern does not hold for spontaneous behaviors, where friends exhibit fewer spontaneous adoptions. We find that susceptibility to influence can be predicted using friends' susceptibility alone, while predicting spontaneous adoption requires additional features, such as user metadata. These findings highlight the complex interplay between user engagement and characteristics in spontaneous content adoption. Our results provide new insights into social influence mechanisms and offer implications for designing more effective moderation strategies to protect vulnerable audiences.

Metadata

publication

ICWSM'25 – 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2025

year

2025

publication date

2025

authors

Luca Luceri, Jinyi Ye, Julie Jiang, Emilio Ferrara

link

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11553

resource_link

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11553

journal

ICWSM'25 – 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media