Can nationalistic information spread like virus?: A cascade tree analysis of diffusion pattern on WeChat moments

WeChat Moments has become an important way for Chinese people to access the latest news. And nationalistic sentiment seems to make some news spread very quickly and get a lot for people involved in, i.e. a viruses-like communication pattern. Is this true? In this study, by constructing cascade trees, we analyzed the diffusion patterns of 175 HTML5 web pages with a complete lifecycle on WeChat Moment during July, 2016. Each page was viewed by more than 10,000 users, and more than two hundred million users are involved in the spread of these pages in total. Results indicated that pages arousing nationalistic sentiment spread more rapidly, attract more sharing behavior, diffuse more like a virus and have a shorter lifespan than other kind of popular pages. Furthermore, this diffusion pattern depends on the credibility of information. Only for the information of high credibility, pages with nationalistic information tend to have deeper cascade trees, higher sharing ratio and spread faster.