102,110 research outputs found
Unsupervised Content-Based Characterization and Anomaly Detection of Online Community Dynamics
The structure and behavior of human networks have been investigated and quantitatively modeled by modern social scientists for decades, however the scope of these efforts is often constrained by the labor-intensive curation processes that are required to collect, organize, and analyze network data. The surge in online social media in recent years provides a new source of dynamic, semi-structured data of digital human networks, many of which embody attributes of real-world networks. In this paper we leverage the Reddit social media platform to study social communities whose dynamics indicate they may have experienced a disturbance event. We describe an unsupervised approach to analyzing natural language content for quantifying community similarity, monitoring temporal changes, and detecting anomalies indicative of disturbance events. We demonstrate how this method is able to detect anomalies in a spectrum of Reddit communities and discuss its applicability to unsupervised event detection for a broader class of social media use cases
Galileo, a data platform for viewing news on social networks
This article aims to introduce Galileo, a platform for extracting and organizing news media data on social networks. Galileo integrates publications made on the main social networks used in the information ecosystem, namely Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Currently, the system includes 97 media outlets from nine countries: Brazil, Chile, Germany, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. Galileo uses a Twitter API and the service CrowdTangle to download Facebook and Instagram posts. This data is stored in a local database and can be accessed through a user-friendly interface, which allows for the analysis of different characteristics of the posts, such as their text, source popularity, and temporal dimension. Galileo is a tool for researchers interested in understanding news cycles and analyzing news content on social networks.
Competitive dynamics of lexical innovations in multi-layer networks
We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language
users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play
an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information
is spread through a variety of networks, including, among others, online and
offline social networks and the World Wide Web. The entire system, comprising
networks of different nature, can be represented as a multi-layer network. In
this context, lexical innovations diffusion occurs in a peculiar fashion. In
particular, a lexical innovation can undergo three different processes: its
original meaning is accepted; its meaning can be changed or misunderstood
(e.g., when not properly explained), hence more than one meaning can emerge in
the population; lastly, in the case of a loan word, it can be translated into
the population language (i.e., defining a new lexical innovation or using a
synonym) or into a dialect spoken by part of the population. Therefore, lexical
innovations cannot be considered simply as information. We develop a model for
analyzing this scenario using a multi-layer network comprising a social network
and a media network. The latter represents the set of all information systems
of a society, e.g., television, the World Wide Web and radio. Furthermore, we
identify temporal directed edges between the nodes of these two networks. In
particular, at each time step, nodes of the media network can be connected to
randomly chosen nodes of the social network and vice versa. In so doing,
information spreads through the whole system and people can share a lexical
innovation with their neighbors or, in the event they work as reporters, by
using media nodes. Lastly, we use the concept of "linguistic sign" to model
lexical innovations, showing its fundamental role in the study of these
dynamics. Many numerical simulations have been performed.Comment: 23 pages, 19 figures, 1 tabl
Online Networks of Support in Distressed Environments: Solidarity and Mobilization during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Despite their drawbacks and unintended consequences, social media networks
have recently emerged as a crucial resource for individuals in distress,
particularly during times of crisis. These platforms serve as a means to seek
assistance and support, share reliable information, and appeal for action and
solidarity. In this paper, we examine the online networks of support during the
Russia-Ukraine conflict by analyzing four major social media networks- Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Using a large dataset of 68 million posts, we
explore the temporal patterns and interconnectedness between these platforms
and online support websites. Our analysis highlights the prevalence of
crowdsourcing and crowdfunding websites as the two main support platforms to
mobilize resources and solicit donations, revealing their purpose and contents,
and investigating different support-seeking and -receiving practices. Overall,
our study underscores the potential of social media in facilitating online
support in distressed environments through grassroots mobilization,
contributing to the growing body of research on the positive impact of online
platforms in promoting social good and protecting vulnerable populations during
times of crisis and conflict
Concurrent Bursty Behavior of Social Sensors in Sporting Events
The advent of social media expands our ability to transmit information and
connect with others instantly, which enables us to behave as "social sensors."
Here, we studied concurrent bursty behavior of Twitter users during major
sporting events to determine their function as social sensors. We show that the
degree of concurrent bursts in tweets (posts) and retweets (re-posts) works as
a strong indicator of winning or losing a game. More specifically, our simple
tweet analysis of Japanese professional baseball games in 2013 revealed that
social sensors can immediately react to positive and negative events through
bursts of tweets, but that positive events are more likely to induce a
subsequent burst of retweets. We also show that these findings hold true across
cultures by analyzing tweets related to Major League Baseball games in 2015.
Furthermore, we demonstrate active interactions among social sensors by
constructing retweet networks during a baseball game. The resulting networks
commonly exhibited user clusters depending on the baseball team, with a
scale-free connectedness that is indicative of a substantial difference in user
popularity as an information source. While previous studies have mainly focused
on bursts of tweets as a simple indicator of a real-world event, the temporal
correlation between tweets and retweets implies unique aspects of social
sensors, offering new insights into human behavior in a highly connected world.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure
- …