Characterizing engagement dynamics across topics on Facebook.

Social media platforms heavily changed how users consume and digest information and, thus, how the popularity of topics evolves. In this paper, we explore the interplay between the virality of controversial topics and how they may trigger heated discussions and eventually increase users' polarization. We perform a quantitative analysis on Facebook by collecting ∼57M posts from ∼2M pages and groups between 2018 and 2022, focusing on engaging topics involving scandals, tragedies, and social and political issues. Using logistic functions, we quantitatively assess the evolution of these topics finding similar patterns in their engagement dynamics. Finally, we show that initial burstiness may predict the rise of users' future adverse reactions regardless of the discussed topic.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Etta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)