119 research outputs found
Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events
The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development
of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics.
Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital
boundaries is still an open challenge. Here we show that online social
interactions during a massive voting event can be used to build an accurate map
of real-world political parties and electoral ranks. We provide evidence that
information flow and collective attention are often driven by a special class
of highly influential users, that we name "augmented humans", who exploit
thousands of automated agents, also known as bots, for enhancing their online
influence. We show that augmented humans generate deep information cascades, to
the same extent of news media and other broadcasters, while they uniformly
infiltrate across the full range of identified groups. Digital augmentation
represents the cyber-physical counterpart of the human desire to acquire power
within social systems.Comment: 11 page
Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval
Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information
diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and
political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi
Park movement in Turkey through the lens of Twitter. We analyze over 2.3
million tweets produced during the 25 days of protest occurred between May and
June 2013. We first characterize the spatio-temporal nature of the conversation
about the Gezi Park demonstrations, showing that similarity in trends of
discussion mirrors geographic cues. We then describe the characteristics of the
users involved in this conversation and what roles they played. We study how
roles and individual influence evolved during the period of the upheaval. This
analysis reveals that the conversation becomes more democratic as events
unfold, with a redistribution of influence over time in the user population. We
conclude by observing how the online and offline worlds are tightly
intertwined, showing that exogenous events, such as political speeches or
police actions, affect social media conversations and trigger changes in
individual behavior.Comment: Best Paper Award at ACM Web Science 201
Recommended from our members
Being a Serial Transnational Activist
Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of them. We show that a noted prominence in networked communication of otherwise unremarkable Twitter users may be an upshot of purposive strategies intended to publicize, support or help orchestrate collective action. Accordingly, we propose the term “engagement compass” to address the relationship between activists' life-patterns and their personal investment in protest over time
Contentious Responses to the Crises in Spain : Emphasis Frames and Public Support for Protest on Twitter and the Press.
This research analyzes how different types of frames adopted by news organizations and social media affected the support for protests against austerity measures in Spain. We pay special attention to the individual understandings of the crises based on materialistic grievances and nonmaterialistic accounts of the economic crises. We identified frames using a supervised approach and a data set of 2 million tweets gathered during the major demonstrations of the Indignados Movement between 2011 and 2013. Our second data set included the news-related content published by the top Spanish newspapers, in terms of circulation, during those demonstrations. We found that support for antiausterity protests was conditioned by understandings of the crisis. Frames addressing the political system were negatively related to the support for protests against austerity measures, as compared with those referring to the crisis as an economic matter. In addition, more challenging and controversial frames generated lower acceptance of the protests among the population than those that primed social problems
Characterizing interactions in online social networks during exceptional events
Nowadays, millions of people interact on a daily basis on online social media
like Facebook and Twitter, where they share and discuss information about a
wide variety of topics. In this paper, we focus on a specific online social
network, Twitter, and we analyze multiple datasets each one consisting of
individuals' online activity before, during and after an exceptional event in
terms of volume of the communications registered. We consider important events
that occurred in different arenas that range from policy to culture or science.
For each dataset, the users' online activities are modeled by a multilayer
network in which each layer conveys a different kind of interaction,
specifically: retweeting, mentioning and replying. This representation allows
us to unveil that these distinct types of interaction produce networks with
different statistical properties, in particular concerning the degree
distribution and the clustering structure. These results suggests that models
of online activity cannot discard the information carried by this multilayer
representation of the system, and should account for the different processes
generated by the different kinds of interactions. Secondly, our analysis
unveils the presence of statistical regularities among the different events,
suggesting that the non-trivial topological patterns that we observe may
represent universal features of the social dynamics on online social networks
during exceptional events
#weAreMaunaKea: celebrity involvement in a protest movement
This study examines the involvement of celebrities in Twitter hashtag networks formed in relation to the protest of the construction of a thirty-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, a volcanic mountaintop that is considered as the most sacred of all peaks in the Hawai'ian islands. A network of 4151 Twitter users who used the hashtag #WeAreMaunaKea is used to examine celebrity involvement. Three network metrics (eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality, and PageRank) were used to examine the prominence of actors in the network. The results show that three celebrities (Nicole Scherzinger, Kelly Slater, and Keahu Kahuanui) have considerable centrality in the network. The results also indicate a positive correlation between in-degree (prestige), out-degree (engagement), and the three metrics. However, the number of followers did not correlate with the centrality of actors. Nicole Scherzinger, who had higher in-degree and out-degree than the others dominated the network in terms of all three metrics. In general, the results indicated that both prestige and engagement matter in celebrity influence
The role of hidden influentials in the diffusion of online information cascades
In a diversified context with multiple social networking sites, heterogeneous
activity patterns and different user-user relations, the concept of
"information cascade" is all but univocal. Despite the fact that such
information cascades can be defined in different ways, it is important to check
whether some of the observed patterns are common to diverse contagion processes
that take place on modern social media. Here, we explore one type of
information cascades, namely, those that are time-constrained, related to two
kinds of socially-rooted topics on Twitter. Specifically, we show that in both
cases cascades sizes distribute following a fat tailed distribution and that
whether or not a cascade reaches system-wide proportions is mainly given by the
presence of so-called hidden influentials. These latter nodes are not the hubs,
which on the contrary, often act as firewalls for information spreading. Our
results are important for a better understanding of the dynamics of complex
contagion and, from a practical side, for the identification of efficient
spreaders in viral phenomena.Comment: Submitted to EPJ Data Scienc
Recommended from our members
Serial Activists: Political Twitter Beyond Influentials and the Twittertariat
This paper introduces a group of politically-charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term serial activists. We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically-coded to provide a typology of serial activists and their struggles with institutionalized power. We found that these users have an ordinary following, but bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to multiple causes. Serial activists differ from influentials or traditional grassroots activists and their activity challenges Twitter scholarship foregrounding the two-step flow model of communication. The results add a much needed depth to the prevalent data-driven treatment of political Twitter by describing a class of extraordinarily prolific users beyond influentials and the twittertariat
- …