Explosive information spreading in higher-order networks: Effect of social reinforcement

Abstract Information spreading has been investigated for many years, but the mechanism of why the information explosively catches on overnight is still under debate. This explosive spreading phenomenon was usually considered driven separately by social reinforcement or higher-order interactions. However, due to the limitations of empirical data and theoretical analysis, how the higher-order network structure affects the explosive information spreading under the role of social reinforcement has not been fully explored. In this work, we propose an information-spreading model by considering the social reinforcement in real and synthetic higher-order networks, describable as hypergraphs. Depending on the average group size (hyperedge cardinality) and node membership (hyperdegree), we observe two different spreading behaviors: (i) The spreading progress is not sensitive to social reinforcement, resulting in the information localized in a small part of nodes; (ii) a strong social reinforcement will promote the large-scale spread of information and induce an explosive transition. Moreover, a large average group size and membership would be beneficial to the appearance of the explosive transition. Further, we display that the heterogeneity of the node membership and group size distributions benefit the information spreading. Finally, we extend the group-based approximate master equations to verify the simulation results. Our findings may help us to comprehend the rapidly information-spreading phenomenon in modern society.