Friends on social media reveal news trends faster than random users
Friends as Sensors: High-Sensitivity Monitoring of Misinformation and Platform Dynamics via the Friendship Paradox
Social and Information NetworksComputers and Society
Summary
Watching the friends of a random social media user reveals news stories about an hour earlier than watching random users themselves. This happens because these friends tend to be better connected and share news quickly, regardless of whether the news is high or low quality. The study found that right-leaning news became more visible among these connected friends during the 2024 US election. However, this method cannot tell good news from bad news, only that it appears sooner and reflects what the platform shows users.
What this means in practice
- •For social media analysts: Detect shifts in news visibility early by monitoring accounts that users retweet instead of random users.
- •For content moderation teams: Identify emerging trends in misinformation faster by focusing on well-connected user accounts within a network.
Authors
Angermaier Mathias, Lasser Jana, Lewandowsky Stephan, Garcia David
Abstract
The friends of a randomly chosen social media user are, on average, better connected than the user, a network property known as the friendship paradox. We use it to monitor misinformation on Twitter/X around the 2024 US election, comparing roughly 27 million tweets from random users with 31 million from the accounts they retweet, which we call sensors. Sensors share news of about the same quality as random users, because news quality follows the political orientation of linked outlets and not the user's position in the network. News links rated by NewsGuard reach sensors a median of 70 minutes earlier, across the quality spectrum. Over the election window, right-leaning content rises about 2.5-fold in visibility, measured as impressions per tweet, among sensors but not among random users. Friendship-paradox sampling therefore cannot separate low-quality from high-quality news, but it detects news early and tracks what a platform makes visible.