An academic paper by three Facebook data scientists (that’s an actual job description) focussed on a photograph of a Norwegian couple who said they’d have sex if their pic got more than one million likes might have uncovered the mechanism that triggers the viral sharing of content on the web.

Hilariously, but perhaps not altogether too surprisingly, the photo (above) got over a million likes in less than a day. So how exactly did the picture hit it so big?

One of the authors, Alex Dow cites “Cascades of reshares”.

You can see those in effect in this graphic representation of the shares of the photo, with each dot representing a human.

More, from Mashable:

The important thing about that graphic, if you’re a data scientist, is that it validates the whole concept of going viral. Strangely, it turns out, there haven’t yet been a lot of studies that prove online stories spread person-to-person, like a chain letter or, indeed, a virus.

They’ll be presenting the rest of the paper at the Artificial Intelligence conference next month.

You can read the rest of the academic paper, here.

[Source : Mashable]