Studying and Modeling the Connection between People's Preferences and Content Sharing
This research addresses the problem of understanding and improving content sharing algorithms for social media users, though it is incremental in nature.
The study investigated how people decide what to share on social media, finding that individuals prioritize their own preferences over the recipient's when sharing, despite self-reported efforts to personalize. A novel process model was proposed to explain this discrepancy, and a prediction model incorporating both sender and recipient preferences showed promising results.
People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to understand how people make their sharing decisions. We find that even when sharing to a specific individual, people's own preference for an item (individuation) dominates over the recipient's preferences (altruism). People's open-ended responses about how they share, however, indicate that they do try to personalize shares based on the recipient. To explain these contrasting results, we propose a novel process model of sharing that takes into account people's preferences and the salience of an item. We also present encouraging results for a sharing prediction model that incorporates both the senders' and the recipients' preferences. These results suggest improvements to both algorithms that support sharing in social media and to information diffusion models.