Online social media is a social vehicle in which people share various moments of their lives with their friends, such as playing sports, cooking dinner or just taking a selfie for fun, via visual means, that is, photographs. Our study takes a closer look at the popular visual concepts illustrating various cultural lifestyles from aggregated, de-identified photographs. We perform analysis both at macroscopic and microscopic levels, to gain novel insights about global and local visual trends as well as the dynamics of interpersonal cultural exchange and diffusion among Facebook friends. We processed images by automatically classifying the visual content by a convolutional neural network (CNN). Through various statistical tests, we find that socially tied individuals more likely post images showing similar cultural lifestyles. To further identify the main cause of the observed social correlation, we use the Shuffle test and the Preference-based Matched Estimation (PME) test to distinguish the effects of influence and homophily. The results indicate that the visual content of each user's photographs are temporally, although not necessarily causally, correlated with the photographs of their friends, which may suggest the effect of influence. Our paper demonstrates that Facebook photographs exhibit diverse cultural lifestyles and preferences and that the social interaction mediated through the visual channel in social media can be an effective mechanism for cultural diffusion.
A few studies have also examined how image features can predict image popularity @cite_6 @cite_1 or viewer engagement @cite_35 . These studies focus on image instance-level analysis ( , what makes image popular?'') whereas our paper investigates whether certain visual concepts propagate between images of different users.
@cite_35 @cite_1 @cite_6
2168117362 2065735564 2039355801
Photos are becoming prominent means of communication online. Despite photos' pervasive presence in social media and online world, we know little about how people interact and engage with their content. Understanding how photo content might signify engagement, can impact both science and design, influencing production and distribution. One common type of photo content that is shared on social media, is the photos of people. From studies of offline behavior, we know that human faces are powerful channels of non-verbal communication. In this paper, we study this behavioral phenomena online. We ask how presence of a face, it's age and gender might impact social engagement on the photo. We use a corpus of 1 million Instagram images and organize our study around two social engagement feedback factors, likes and comments. Our results show that photos with faces are 38 more likely to receive likes and 32 more likely to receive comments, even after controlling for social network reach and activity. We find, however, that the number of faces, their age and gender do not have an effect. This work presents the first results on how photos with human faces relate to engagement on large scale image sharing communities. In addition to contributing to the research around online user behavior, our findings offer a new line of future work using visual analysis. Little is known on how visual content affects the popularity on social networks, despite images being now ubiquitous on the Web, and currently accounting for a considerable fraction of all content shared. Existing art on image sharing focuses mainly on non-visual attributes. In this work we take a complementary approach, and investigate resharing from a mainly visual perspective. Two sets of visual features are proposed, encoding both aesthetical properties (brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc.), and semantical content (concepts represented by the images). We collected data from a large image-sharing service (Pinterest) and evaluated the predictive power of different features on popularity (number of reshares). We found that visual properties have low predictive power compared that of social cues. However, after factoring-out social influence, visual features show considerable predictive power, especially for images with higher exposure, with over 3:1 accuracy odds when classifying highly exposed images between very popular and unpopular. Hundreds of thousands of photographs are uploaded to the internet every minute through various social networking and photo sharing platforms. While some images get millions of views, others are completely ignored. Even from the same users, different photographs receive different number of views. This begs the question: What makes a photograph popular? Can we predict the number of views a photograph will receive even before it is uploaded? These are some of the questions we address in this work. We investigate two key components of an image that affect its popularity, namely the image content and social context. Using a dataset of about 2.3 million images from Flickr, we demonstrate that we can reliably predict the normalized view count of images with a rank correlation of 0.81 using both image content and social cues. In this paper, we show the importance of image cues such as color, gradients, deep learning features and the set of objects present, as well as the importance of various social cues such as number of friends or number of photos uploaded that lead to high or low popularity of images.