Repeated reposting on X drives commercial spam amplification patterns
Attentional DoS: Repeat Reposting, Collective Attention, and Information Diffusion on X
Social and Information Networks
Summary
Social media users on X can repeatedly repost the same content to get it seen again without new posts. The authors studied large popular posts and found that while repeated reposting is rare overall, certain accounts do it habitually, especially targeting mainly Chinese-script spam content. This behavior creates bursts of repeated attention that help some posts grow more attention but does not seem to take attention away from other content. Essentially, some groups use repeat reposting like a coordinated spam strategy that re-enters the competition for viewers’ attention.
What this means in practice
- •For social media platform operators: Detect and limit habitual repeat reposting patterns to reduce commercial spam amplification on timelines.
- •For online marketing teams: Identify how coordinated repeat reposting can boost visibility of commercial content to tailor ad campaigns.
Tested on one dataset.
Authors
Genta Toya, Bruno T. Sugano, Kei Ichikawa, Qianyun Wu, Shuhei Saigusa, Yasuhiro Hashimoto, Masashi Toyoda, Naoki Yoshinaga, Kazutoshi Sasahara
Abstract
Collective attention is a finite shared resource, and social media posts compete for limited opportunities to be seen. On X, users can undo a repost and repost it again. By repeating this cycle, a user can put the same post back into followers' timelines any number of times without making new content. We call this procedure repeat reposting, and we read it as placing repeated demand on this shared resource (Attentional DoS). We formalize this idea and explore repeat reposting in a large-scale dataset of cascades with at least 1,000 reactions, originating from posts classified as Japanese on X, covering April 2025 to March 2026. Repeat reposts are rare, appearing in a small share of all (user, post) pairs. Even so, close to a million posts have at least one repeater, and most repeats come from a small group of habitual accounts. The central result is that subsequent audience growth is associated less with the number of repeats than with the estimated reach of the repeating accounts. Through the lens of seriality, how habitually the same groups of accounts repeat reposts across many posts, a distinct distributed form emerges: several serial amplifiers converge on the same post (Attentional DDoS). Its synchrony, how closely their actions are timed together, forms a continuum from bursts on the scale of minutes to a daily clock. A check of the content of 99.7% of amplified posts shows that most ADDoS repeat events are directed at Chinese-script content, which our vocabulary matching and sample inspection indicate is predominantly commercial spam. Repeat reposting thus lets a post re-enter the competition for visibility. The observed pattern is better characterized as repeated temporal coverage of an existing audience and the self-reinforcement of posts that are already growing, rather than as evidence that repeat reposting takes reach from other content.