Searching for superspreaders of information in real-world social media

A number of predictors have been suggested to detect the most influential spreaders of information in online social media across various domains such as Twitter or Facebook. In particular, degree, PageRank, k-core and other centralities have been adopted to rank the spreading capability of users in information dissemination media. So far, validation of the proposed predictors has been done by simulating the spreading dynamics rather than following real information flow in social networks. Consequently, only model-dependent contradictory results have been achieved so far for the best predictor. Here, we address this issue directly. We search for influential spreaders by following the real spreading dynamics in a wide range of networks. We find that the widely-used degree and PageRank fail in ranking users' influence. We find that the best spreaders are consistently located in the k-core across dissimilar social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and scientific publishing in the American Physical Society. Furthermore, when the complete global network structure is unavailable, we find that the sum of the nearest neighbors' degree is a reliable local proxy for user's influence. Our analysis provides practical instructions for optimal design of strategies for "viral" information dissemination in relevant applications.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Social influence analysis in microblogging platforms - a topic-sensitive based approach

The use of Social Media, particularly microblogging platforms such as Twitter, has proven to be an effective channel for promoting ideas to online audiences. In a world where information can bias public opinion it is essential to analyse the propagation and influence of information in large-scale networks. Recent research studying social media data to rank users by topical relevance have largely focused on the “retweet", “following" and “mention" relations. In this paper we propose the use of semantic profiles for deriving influential users based on the retweet subgraph of the Twitter graph. We introduce a variation of the PageRank algorithm for analysing users’ topical and entity influence based on the topical/entity relevance of a retweet relation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related algorithms including HITS, InDegree and Topic-Sensitive PageRank. We also introduce VisInfluence, a visualisation platform for presenting top influential users based on a topical query need

Human-Centric Cyber Social Computing Model for Hot-Event Detection and Propagation

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Microblogging networks have gained popularity in recent years as a platform enabling expressions of human emotions, through which users can conveniently produce contents on public events, breaking news, and/or products. Subsequently, microblogging networks generate massive amounts of data that carry opinions and mass sentiment on various topics. Herein, microblogging is regarded as a useful platform for detecting and propagating new hot events. It is also a useful channel for identifying high-quality posts, popular topics, key interests, and high-influence users. The existence of noisy data in the traditional social media data streams enforces to focus on human-centric computing. This paper proposes a human-centric social computing (HCSC) model for hot-event detection and propagation in microblogging networks. In the proposed HCSC model, all posts and users are preprocessed through hypertext induced topic search (HITS) for determining high-quality subsets of the users, topics, and posts. Then, a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based multiprototype user topic detection method is used for identifying users with high influence in the network. Furthermore, an influence maximization is used for final determination of influential users based on the user subsets. Finally, the users mined by influence maximization process are generated as the influential user sets for specific topics. Experimental results prove the superiority of our HCSC model against similar models of hot-event detection and information propagation

Detecting and Tracking the Spread of Astroturf Memes in Microblog Streams

Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We introduce an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. We describe a Web service that leverages this framework to track political memes in Twitter and help detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Finally, we discuss promising preliminary results on the detection of suspicious memes via supervised learning based on features extracted from the topology of the diffusion networks, sentiment analysis, and crowdsourced annotations

Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends

Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and 'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology

Who’s Following Twitter? Coverage of the Microblogging Phenomenon by U.S. Cable News Networks

Through data captured in a digital content analysis (DCA) lab, we examine coverage of Twitter across three 24-hour U.S. cable news channels: CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. This investigation tracked Twitter coverage from its initial stage, followed by its rise to a massively used tool and its subsequent diffusion into society, evident through its plateauing coverage. News stories covering Twitter, as it penetrated into society, were more likely to use benefit/gain frames when discussing the technology, highlighting its positive social, communicative, political, and participatory impact. Benefit frames were also likely to associate Twitter with journalism. Patterns emerging through the indicator graphs plotted by the DCA lab showed that the most intense coverage occurred during crisis situations, as Twitter coverage reached saturation, followed by increased personal daily usage of Twitter