Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
Summary:
The paper analyzes the influence of emotions of people on his friends and other people in social networks. The authors observe user posts from real-time social network data like Facebook for over 20 yrs. They identify posts as positive and negative from the words contained in the posts. They observe the behavior of people using two different patterns. First reducing positive contents from user news feed, second reducing negative contents from user news feed. Their observation show that people having more negative contents in news feed post more negative status and vice versa.
Reflection:
Some challenges and questions-
The paper identify positive/negative contents and posts with words. What if some positively used words used in the posts in negative or sarcastic way?
Can it happen that on reaction to some negative contents the status updated are positive? People’s perspective can be different.
How the contents are identified as positive/negative. Same posts or content can be negative to one while positive to other people.
Some ideas:
better observation to understand which contents change people reaction most? Is it more vocal over posts/ texts or video, photos etc.
