Feld's friendship paradox states that "your friends have more friends than you, on average." This paradox arises because extremely popular people, despite being rare, are overrepresented when averaging over friends. Using a sample of the Twitter firehose, we confirm that the friendship paradox holds for >98 of Twitter users. Because of the directed nature of the follower graph on Twitter, we are further able to confirm more detailed forms of the friendship paradox: everyone you follow or who follows you has more friends and followers than you. This is likely caused by a correlation we demonstrate between Twitter activity, number of friends, and number of followers. In addition, we discover two new paradoxes: the virality paradox that states "your friends receive more viral content than you, on average," and the activity paradox, which states "your friends are more active than you, on average." The latter paradox is important in regulating online communication. It may result in users having difficulty maintaining optimal incoming information rates, because following additional users causes the volume of incoming tweets to increase super-linearly. While users may compensate for increased information flow by increasing their own activity, users become information overloaded when they receive more information than they are able or willing to process. We compare the average size of cascades that are sent and received by overloaded and underloaded users. And we show that overloaded users post and receive larger cascades and they are poor detector of small cascades.
The present work demonstrates that a clear model of how users discover friends and manage existing friendships is essential for mitigating any undesirable consequences of the high correlation between activity and connectivity. For example, among children, this can result in popular" kids having undue influence on others regarding the perception of peer alcohol and drug abuse @cite_20 @cite_28 . Furthermore, better understanding the activity paradox can help online social networks identify and recommend interesting users to follow that will account for any undesired information overload.
@cite_28 @cite_20
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False consensus, or the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share one's own attitudes and behaviors, was investigated in a study of 348 university students classified as non-drug users, cannabis-only users, or amphetamine+ cannabis users. Participants estimated the prevalence of cannabis and amphetamine use among students. Cannabis and amphetamine users made significantly higher estimates of cannabis use among students than did nonusers, whereas amphetamine users gave significantly higher estimates of amphetamine use than nonusers and cannabis-only users. Correlations between estimates of use among friends and other students were significantly positive for both drugs. The results suggest that students are motivated to overestimate the commonality of their own position on drug use and that their estimates may also be influenced by selective exposure. Associations of popularity with adolescent substance use were examined among 1793 6-8th grade students who completed an in-school survey. Popularity was assessed through both self-ratings and peer nominations. Students who scored higher on either measure of popularity were more likely to be lifetime cigarette smokers, drinkers, and marijuana users, as well as past month drinkers. Self-rated popularity was positively associated with past month marijuana use and heavy drinking, and peer-nominated popularity showed a quadratic association with past month heavy drinking. These results extend previous work and highlight that popularity, whether based on self-perceptions or peer friendship nominations, is a risk factor for substance use during middle school. Given the substantial increase in peer influence during early adolescence, prevention program effectiveness may be enhanced by addressing popularity as a risk factor for substance use or working with popular students to be peer leaders to influence social norms and promote healthier choices. Language: en