Jumping onto the Bandwagon of Collective Gatekeepers: Testing the Bandwagon Effect of Information Diffusion on Social News Website
Abstract
Based on collaborative information filtering and information aggregation services, the social news website carries out a collective gatekeeping function, supplying an empirical ground to test the bandwagon effect on information diffusion. Modeling the interpersonal effect and bandwagon effect in collective gatekeeping with threshold models, we confirm the bandwagon effect of collective gatekeeping on news diffusion with two novel datasets.
Jumping onto the Bandwagon of Collective Gatekeepers: Testing the Bandwagon Effect of Information Diffusion on Social News Website
Cheng-Jun Wang $ ^{a,b}$ * , Jonathan J.H. Zhu ${^b}$
$^a$ Computational Communication Collaboratory, School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
$^b$ Web Mining Lab, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Keywords
Information Diffusion; Collective Gatekeeping; Interpersonal Effects; Bandwagon Effects; Threshold Model
The results demonstrate that the bandwagon of collective gatekeepers is the primary driver for online news diffusion. Interestingly, the bandwagon effect of collective gatekeeping is moderated by the strength of interpersonal effects. The theoretical generalizations of this research contribute to our understanding about the impact of collective gatekeeping on information diffusion.
Highlights
- Drawing on threshold models to capture the interpersonal effects and collective gatekeeping, we test our hypothesis with two novel datasets of information diffusion on social media.
- The findings demonstrate that both bandwagon effect and interpersonal effect play important roles in collective gatekeeping on social media.
- The bandwagon of collective gatekeepers is the primary driver for online news diffusion
- The bandwagon effect of collective gatekeeping is moderated by the strength of interpersonal effects.
Telematics and Informatics
- Received at Editorial Office 2 Jul 2018
- Article 3rd revised 19 Feb 2019
- Article accepted for publication 3 Mar 2019
Please cite this article as:
Wang, C-J. * , Zhu, J.J.H.(2019) Jumping onto the Bandwagon of Collective Gatekeepers: Testing the Bandwagon Effect of Information Diffusion on Social News Website, Telematics and Informatics. 41:34-45, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2019.03.001