Information-Theoretic Measures of Influence Based on Content Dynamics

Understand

The fundamental building block of social influence is for one person to elicit a response in another.

• Researchers measuring a "response" in social media typically depend either on detailed models of human behavior or on platform-specific cues such as re-tweets, hash tags, URLs, or mentions.
• Most content on social networks is difficult to model because the modes and motivation of human expression are diverse and incompletely understood.
• We introduce content transfer, an information-theoretic measure with a predictive interpretation that directly quantifies the strength of the effect of one user's content on another's in a model-free way.