Viral social media stories?

When we think of the many ways social media has transformed our information worlds, one specter that comes to mind is that of the viral story - a news event that may be ignored by the lame-stream, but that seeps its way into Twitter or FB, slowly catches on (or flares immediately) and eventually saturates our online social networks.

But, while those events may or may not exist, they are probably exceedingly rare, according to a 2012 paper by Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and Daniel Goldstein. Those researchers tracked 80,000 Twitter stories to see what the typical "cascade" (wave of retweets started by a single tweet) looked like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 95% of cascades can't really be called such - they are made up of a single tweet that never gets retweeted. 

But, the authors ask, even though most cascades never really happen, might there be enough huge cascades that they end up making up most (or much) of our social media news-stream. Not so. When we do retweet news stories we do so from the source; 60% of retweets aren't branching off from long information cascades, but are simply retweeting the story from its origin.

Of the 80,000 stories the researchers tracked, only about 0.001% make it out past 5 waves of retweets, suggesting that viral news stories are - if anything - extremely rare. The authors suggest instead that what may seem like viral social media stories may, in fact, be spread by the traditional media - and that they saturate our social media walls because everyone is picking up the story from, say, CNN or the Washington Post.

It could be, though, that the researchers' sample was too small to pick up the "mega-cascades" that we imagine are a unique feature of social media. The "Trayvon Martin" stories, which circulate for weeks on social media before being picked up by traditional media may be, truly, 1 in a million - or billion - rather than 1 in 80,000.

Still, the authors' findings make it hard to deny that the vast majority of news stories we see on Twitter are either initial tweets or one-off retweets - and that super cascades are the tiniest sliver of the news we see. Of the stories swirling around social media, almost all are stories users find from outside Twitter and bring into the network for a single exposure. It's show and tell rather than a game of telephone.

That would mean that what really matters for determining what we see in social media is not what people re-post, but rather what they find from the outside media and decide is important enough to post themselves.