The rapid development of World Wide Web accelerates information spreading in various ways. Thanks to the emergence of multiple social platforms, some events which are not much attractive in the past can become social hot spots nowadays. In this paper, we study the information diffusion process of “IP MAN3 box office fraud”, which is widely diffused in the largest Chinese microblogging system, namely Sina Weibo, in March 2016. Based on the temporal metric we have proposed, we succeed in finding out the sources of the information, and constructing the panorama of the diffusion process. In addition, a portion of nodes that promote the diffusion are identified by using the node importance algorithms. Finally, the users with abnormal behaviors in the process of event development are identified.

Purpose - Information carriers (including mass media and We-Media) play important roles in information diffusion on social networks. The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the dissemination of information combing with data analysis. Design/methodology/approach - This work analyzed nearly 200 years of coverage of different information carriers during different periods of human society, from the period of only mouth-to-mouth communication to the period of modern society. Information diffusion models are built to illustrate how the information dynamic changes with time and combined box office data of several movies to predict the process of information diffusion. In addition, a metric is defined to identify which information would become news in the future. Findings - Results show that with the development of information carriers, information spreads faster and wider nowadays. The correctness of the metric proposed has been validated. Research limitations/implications - The structure of social networks influences the dissemination of information. There are an enormous number of factors that influence the formation of hotspots. Practical implications - The results and conclusion of this work will benefit by predicting the evolution of information carriers. The metric proposed will aid in searching hot news in the future. Originality/value - This work may shed some light on a better understanding of information diffusion, spreading not only on social networks but also on the carriers used for the information spreading.