Communications of the ACM
The Facebook Page That Posts the Same Picture Every Day
Researchers are using the Facebook page "the same photo of Toto Cutogno every day" as a control for experiments examining the way people consume content on social media.
Credit: Facebook
The Facebook page "the same photo of Toto Cutugno every day" has caught the attention of fans of the Italian singer as well as researchers at Italy's Institute for Advanced Study.
The researchers see the page, with its cult following and homogeneity of content, as the perfect control for experiments examining the way people consume content on social media. Comparing the page with 34 and 39 others devoted to science and conspiracy theories, respectively, the researchers report most users give a small number of likes while a few dole out a large number of likes.
In addition, users of all pages showed a similar pattern with regard to how long they continued to like the page, although the control page showed more likes for very long periods.
The big difference between the way people use the pages is in the number of likes each post receives, which follows heavy-tailed distribution for the conspiracy and science pages. With a limited number of fans of Cutugno, the control page follows something like a normal distribution with a clear average number of likes.
From Technology Review
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