Pseudo-cores: The terminus of an intelligent viral Meme’s trajectory

Abstract

Most memes die soon after they have been released, but only few go viral and spread worldwide. Identifying the secret recipe for the success of such viral memes is a very interesting ongoing research question. While many researchers have attributed the success of a meme to its content and place of origin, we propose taking into consideration the underlying network structure that the meme propagates on. In this paper, we induce artificial virality in a meme by intelligently directing its trajectory in the network. This induction is based upon the spreading power of core nodes in a core-periphery structure. This paper puts forward two greedy hill climbing approaches to determine the path from a node in the periphery shell (where the memes generally originate) to the core of the network. We also unearth specialized shells— Pseudo-Core, which emulate the behavior of the core in terms of spreading power. We consider two sets for the target nodes, one being core and the other being any of the pseudo-cores. We show that our algorithms perform better than random and degree based approaches and have a worst case time complexity of O(n). The paper highlights the importance of core-periphery structure in a network and the role of pseudo-cores in making a meme go viral.