Modeling news spread as an SIR process over temporal networks

Abstract

News spread in internet media outlets can be seen as a contagious process generating temporal networks representing the influence between published articles. In this article we propose a methodology based on the application of natural language analysis of the articles to reconstruct the spread network. From the reconstructed network, we show that the dynamics of the news spread can be approximated by a classical SIR epidemiological dynamics upon the network. From the results obtained we argue that the methodology proposed can be used to make predictions about media repercussion, and also to detect viral memes in news streams.