Understanding information diffusion is vital to explaining the good, bad, and ugly impacts of social media. Two types of processes govern information diffusion: broadcasting and viral spread. Viral spreading is when a message is diffused by peer-to-peer social connections, whereas broadcasting is characterized by influences that can come from outside of the peer-to-peer social network. How these processes shape public discourse is not well understood. Using a simulation study and real-world Twitter data (10,155 users, 18,000,929 tweets) gathered during 2020, we show that broadcast spreading is associated with more integrated discourse networks compared to viral spreading. Moreover, discourse oscillates between extended periods of segregation and punctuated periods of integration. These results defy simple interpretations of good or bad, and instead suggest that information diffusion dynamics on social media have the capacity to disrupt or amplify both prosocial and antisocial content.

中文翻译：

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社交媒体网络上的广播信息传播过程：外生事件导致更加整合的公共话语

了解信息传播对于解释社交媒体的好、坏和丑陋影响至关重要。两种类型的过程控制信息传播：广播和病毒传播。病毒式传播是指消息通过点对点社交关系传播，而广播的特点是可能来自点对点社交网络之外的影响。这些过程如何塑造公共话语尚不清楚。使用模拟研究和 2020 年收集的真实 Twitter 数据（10,155 名用户，18,000,929 条推文），我们表明与病毒式传播相比，广播传播与更完整的话语网络相关联。此外，话语在延长的隔离期和间断的整合期之间摇摆不定。这些结果违背了对好或坏的简单解释，