Information Spreading in Microblogging Systems: Media Effect Versus Social Impact

In this paper, we try to distinguish between the two impacts from media and sociability for information spreading. We analyze the forwarding behavior in Sina Weibo and find that the large-scale microblogs' forwarding chain spread path presents an obvious starlike structure, in which the big degree nodes play a very important role in promoting information spread scale and velocity. In addition, we observe that friend forwarding behavior can improve the user's forwarding probability, and the impact is greater from the reciprocal links.