Information diffusion on facebook: A case study of the sunflower student movement in Taiwan

Abstract

On March 18, 2014, some students occupied the Taiwanese Parliament Building in order to resume the negotiation for the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). They posted as well as shared posts on Facebook and even created fan pages on Facebook to fight against CSSTA. The influence of Facebook is constantly growing, and there are studies that focus on information diffusion in order to reach a large audience. We analyze information diffusion through message spreading such as sharing posts or commenting on posts. Most relevant studies use social connections in analysis of information diffusion. However, due to the privacy protection mechanism on Facebook, social connections in data available to the public are implicit, while explicit social connections such as friend lists are private data. We use public data collected from fan pages on Facebook to analyze information diffusion. Our method does not rely on the availability of social connections, and therefore it can be applied to other social media websites. We investigate the influence of posts on these fan pages in this special civil movement. We analyze users` reaction behaviors and develop a method to find important users who change the speed of information diffusion and thus play a crucial role. © 2017 ACM.