Fig 1. Graphical representation of a diffusion tree on Sina Weibo.

This is a graphic representation for one of the popular messages on Weibo, and the branching process can be seen. It has been shared more than 190,000 times. The purple dots represent users who have shared the message, and green lines represent the paths through which the messages are spread. If a user A shared the message from user B, a green line is drawn between both. The clusters of purple dots corresponds to a user with a large number of followers who have shared the message from this user.