The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 3; no. 1; p. 2980
• Main Authors: De Domenico, M., Lima, A., Mougel, P., Musolesi, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 18.10.2013; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/705; 639/705/117; 639/766/25; 639/766/408/530; Algorithms; Computer Simulation; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Information Dissemination; Information processing; Models, Theoretical; multidisciplinary; Quarks; Science; Social Media; Spatio-Temporal Analysis; Spreading; Time Factors
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep02980

The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21 st century. In this paper we present a study of information spreading processes on Twitter before, during and after the announcement of the discovery of a new particle with the features of the elusive Higgs boson on 4 th July 2012. We report evidence for non-trivial spatio-temporal patterns in user activities at individual and global level, such as tweeting, re-tweeting and replying to existing tweets. We provide a possible explanation for the observed time-varying dynamics of user activities during the spreading of this scientific “rumor”. We model the information spreading in the corresponding network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery. Finally, we show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about 500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.