New tool predicts which photos will go viral on Facebook

WASHINGTON: Scientists have developed a computer algorithm that predicts whether a photo will go viral on Facebook by watching how fast it is shared.

Stanford researchers said the clues to predicting which of the many millions of photos on Facebook will spring from obscurity and go viral lie in ‘cascades’. The term ‘cascades’ is used to describe photos or videos being shared multiple times.

According to data provided by Facebook scientists in a recent collaboration with university scientists, only 1 in 20 photos posted on the social network gets shared even once. And just 1 in 4,000 gets more than 500 shares - a lot but hardly an epidemic.

In a paper to be presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Seoul, Korea, the researchers will describe how they accurately predicted, 8 out of 10 times, when a photo cascade would double in shares; that is, if a photo got 10 shares, would it get 20 If it got 500, would it reach 1,000, and so on.

The team began by analysing 150,000 Facebook photos, each of which had been shared at least five times.

The data were stripped of names and identifiers to protect privacy. A preliminary analysis of those photos revealed that, at any given point in a cascade, there was a 50-50 chance that the number of shares would double.

The scientists then looked for variables that might help them predict doubling events more accurately than a coin toss, including the rate and speed at which photos were shared, and the structure of sharing (photos reposted in multiple networks proved to create stronger cascades).

After factoring several criteria into their analysis the scientists were able to accurately predict doubling events almost 80% of the time.