3,761 research outputs found
Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok
TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is
increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019.
Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves
dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing
political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary
evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US
partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated
with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision,
natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that
political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to
other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information
channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes
place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of
responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that
users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the
platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their
videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged
significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science
Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version
includes corrected typo
Language in Our Time: An Empirical Analysis of Hashtags
Hashtags in online social networks have gained tremendous popularity during
the past five years. The resulting large quantity of data has provided a new
lens into modern society. Previously, researchers mainly rely on data collected
from Twitter to study either a certain type of hashtags or a certain property
of hashtags. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale empirical analysis
of hashtags shared on Instagram, the major platform for hashtag-sharing. We
study hashtags from three different dimensions including the temporal-spatial
dimension, the semantic dimension, and the social dimension. Extensive
experiments performed on three large-scale datasets with more than 7 million
hashtags in total provide a series of interesting observations. First, we show
that the temporal patterns of hashtags can be categorized into four different
clusters, and people tend to share fewer hashtags at certain places and more
hashtags at others. Second, we observe that a non-negligible proportion of
hashtags exhibit large semantic displacement. We demonstrate hashtags that are
more uniformly shared among users, as quantified by the proposed hashtag
entropy, are less prone to semantic displacement. In the end, we propose a
bipartite graph embedding model to summarize users' hashtag profiles, and rely
on these profiles to perform friendship prediction. Evaluation results show
that our approach achieves an effective prediction with AUC (area under the ROC
curve) above 0.8 which demonstrates the strong social signals possessed in
hashtags.Comment: WWW 201
#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds
Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this
paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be
considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We
identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can
identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near
future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times
T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This
technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since
newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the
compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an
overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can
discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful
in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM
conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW
2016
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