The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor

2013/01/31 by M. De Domenico, A. Lima, P. Mougel +1 · 277 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Dynamics (music) #Higgs boson #Large Hadron Collider #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Rumor #Scientific discovery #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/srep02980

published in Scientific Reports 3(1), 2980 (Nature Portfolio) · 11 pages, 8 figures

arxiv created 2013/07/16 · openalex publication_date 2013/10/18 · arxiv updated 2013/10/22 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21(st) century. In this paper we present a study of information spreading processes on Twitter before, during and after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle with the features of the elusive Higgs boson on 4(th) July 2012. We report evidence for non-trivial spatio-temporal patterns in user activities at individual and global level, such as tweeting, re-tweeting and replying to existing tweets. We provide a possible explanation for the observed time-varying dynamics of user activities during the spreading of this scientific "rumor". We model the information spreading in the corresponding network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery. Finally, we show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about 500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.

Citations

• Discrete-time Markov chain approach to contact-based disease spreading in complex networks
• A Brief History of Generative Models for Power Law and Lognormal Distributions
• Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons
• Spread of epidemic disease on networks
• Mixing patterns in networks
• Epidemic Spreading in Scale-Free Networks
• Assortative Mixing in Networks
• Spreading dynamics following bursty human activity patterns
• Identification of influential spreaders in complex networks
• Nonperturbative heterogeneous mean-field approach to epidemic spreading in complex networks
• The Structure and Function of Complex Networks
• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• A New Product Growth for Model Consumer Durables

Cited by

• Understanding GNNs and Homophily in Dynamic Node Classification
• Computing classic closeness centrality, at scale
• HPRA: Hyperedge Prediction using Resource Allocation
• Higgs boson [wikipedia]

Related

• Virality detection and control strategies in rumor models
• Agent Based Rumor Spreading in a scale-free network
• Propagation Dynamics of Rumor vs. Non-rumor across Multiple Social Media Platforms Driven by User Characteristics
• An Information Diffusion Approach to Rumor Propagation and Identification on Twitter
• Investigating Rumor Propagation with TwitterTrails