https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48200-7
Drivers of social #influence in the #Twitter migration to #Mastodon
Lucio La Cava, Luca Maria Aiello & Andrea Tagarelli
..."The first finding of our study is that the only structural factor that was consistently associated with an increased
is the sparsity of social connections. This is somewhat unexpected, because it contradicts the conventional understanding that close social proximity, characterized by high clustering and dense social connections, leads to faster and broader adoption of new behaviors53. We propose two non-exclusive explanations for this counter-intuitive trend. Firstly, the discussion surrounding the #TwitterMigration phenomenon competed with numerous other topics vying for the limited attention of Twitter users. The prominence of #TwitterMigration in the overall discourse might have been more diluted in denser follower networks54. Secondly, the incentive to migrate may simply be proportional to the fraction of a user’s friends who have already migrated, and such fraction increases more rapidly in networks with fewer social connections.
Our second finding is that communities engaging in more frequent discussions on the #TwitterMigration topic exhibited higher
. We interpret this result in the light of theories linking the rapid emergence of consensus to the influence exerted by committed individuals, even when they constitute a small minority19. While this intuition is grounded in strong theoretical foundations20,55, empirical support has been limited56. Our operationalization of commitment, as a simple and straightforward measure to quantify the level of engagement in discussing a specific topic, contributes to validating the underlying theoretical framework.
The third and final finding of our study is that communities in which the influence process unfolded more rapidly are those whose discourse frequently emphasizes a shared identity and engages in substantial exchanges of factual knowledge. Extensive research in social psychology has established a connection between psycho-linguistic aspects of social interaction and successful, spontaneous coordination22,23,24,25. In particular, the Identity Theory posits that cooperation can be facilitated through cognitive mechanisms that foster a sense of belonging to the same social group57, suggesting that identity may be pivotal in overcoming social dilemmas involving coordinated behavior that entail inherent risks or a non-zero cost of action58. Moreover, the exchange of truthful, factual information has been identified as a prerequisite for constructive debates and, ultimately, persuasion59."...
