The first step to knowing why some things spread like wildfire is to work out how this happens. Now a team at Microsoft Research, led by Jake Hofman, has devised a way to measure the virulence of online content.
For 18 months Mr Hofman's group recorded every tweet containing a link to
anything on the world's 40 most popular websites for news, music and videos.
These featured over 1 billion pieces of content on YouTube, Yahoo, Instagram and
the BBC. The researchers then selected those that were linked to on at least 100
different feeds, for a total of nearly 300,000 web pages and 1.4 billion tweets.
They then painstakingly reconstructed how each of these stories passed from
person to person. This allowed them to identify the different ways information
spreads.
