Bridging Nations: Quantifying the Role of Multilinguals in Communication on Social Media
This work addresses the challenge of understanding global information spread for researchers and policymakers, though it is incremental in applying causal inference to an existing social media context.
The study tackled the problem of how information crosses linguistic boundaries on social media by quantifying the role of multilingual users, finding that posting in multiple languages increases betweenness centrality by 13% and multilingual neighbors boost monolinguals' odds of sharing cross-lingual content by up to 16-fold.
Social media enables the rapid spread of many kinds of information, from memes to social movements. However, little is known about how information crosses linguistic boundaries. We apply causal inference techniques on the European Twitter network to quantify multilingual users' structural role and communication influence in cross-lingual information exchange. Overall, multilinguals play an essential role; posting in multiple languages increases betweenness centrality by 13%, and having a multilingual network neighbor increases monolinguals' odds of sharing domains and hashtags from another language 16-fold and 4-fold, respectively. We further show that multilinguals have a greater impact on diffusing information less accessible to their monolingual compatriots, such as information from far-away countries and content about regional politics, nascent social movements, and job opportunities. By highlighting information exchange across borders, this work sheds light on a crucial component of how information and ideas spread around the world.