331,371 research outputs found
Long Trend Dynamics in Social Media
A main characteristic of social media is that its diverse content, copiously
generated by both standard outlets and general users, constantly competes for
the scarce attention of large audiences. Out of this flood of information some
topics manage to get enough attention to become the most popular ones and thus
to be prominently displayed as trends. Equally important, some of these trends
persist long enough so as to shape part of the social agenda. How this happens
is the focus of this paper. By introducing a stochastic dynamical model that
takes into account the user's repeated involvement with given topics, we can
predict the distribution of trend durations as well as the thresholds in
popularity that lead to their emergence within social media. Detailed
measurements of datasets from Twitter confirm the validity of the model and its
predictions
Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention
on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous
events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as
they are driven by activity in specific geographic areas that act as sources of
traffic and information flow. Taken independently, trends and geography have
been discussed in recent literature on online social media; although, so far,
little has been done to characterize the relation between trends and geography.
Here we investigate more than eleven thousand topics that trended on Twitter in
63 main US locations during a period of 50 days in 2013. This data allows us to
study the origins and pathways of trends, how they compete for popularity at
the local level to emerge as winners at the country level, and what dynamics
underlie their production and consumption in different geographic areas. We
identify two main classes of trending topics: those that surface locally,
coinciding with three different geographic clusters (East coast, Midwest and
Southwest); and those that emerge globally from several metropolitan areas,
coinciding with the major air traffic hubs of the country. These hubs act as
trendsetters, generating topics that eventually trend at the country level, and
driving the conversation across the country. This poses an intriguing
conjecture, drawing a parallel between the spread of information and diseases:
Do trends travel faster by airplane than over the Internet?Comment: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks,
pp. 213-222, 201
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
The Effect of Collective Attention on Controversial Debates on Social Media
We study the evolution of long-lived controversial debates as manifested on
Twitter from 2011 to 2016. Specifically, we explore how the structure of
interactions and content of discussion varies with the level of collective
attention, as evidenced by the number of users discussing a topic. Spikes in
the volume of users typically correspond to external events that increase the
public attention on the topic -- as, for instance, discussions about `gun
control' often erupt after a mass shooting.
This work is the first to study the dynamic evolution of polarized online
debates at such scale. By employing a wide array of network and content
analysis measures, we find consistent evidence that increased collective
attention is associated with increased network polarization and network
concentration within each side of the debate; and overall more uniform lexicon
usage across all users.Comment: accepted at ACM WebScience 201
Measuring, Predicting and Visualizing Short-Term Change in Word Representation and Usage in VKontakte Social Network
Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and
disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. Such
dynamics are especially notable during a period of crisis. This work addresses
several important tasks of measuring, visualizing and predicting short term
text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word's contextual semantics,
and contrasting such shift with surface level word dynamics, or concept drift,
observed in social media streams. Unlike previous approaches on learning word
representations from text, we study the relationship between short-term concept
drift and representation shift on a large social media corpus - VKontakte posts
in Russian collected during the Russia-Ukraine crisis in 2014-2015. Our novel
contributions include quantitative and qualitative approaches to (1) measure
short-term representation shift and contrast it with surface level concept
drift; (2) build predictive models to forecast short-term shifts in meaning
from previous meaning as well as from concept drift; and (3) visualize
short-term representation shift for example keywords to demonstrate the
practical use of our approach to discover and track meaning of newly emerging
terms in social media. We show that short-term representation shift can be
accurately predicted up to several weeks in advance. Our unique approach to
modeling and visualizing word representation shifts in social media can be used
to explore and characterize specific aspects of the streaming corpus during
crisis events and potentially improve other downstream classification tasks
including real-time event detection
Temporal effects in trend prediction: identifying the most popular nodes in the future
Prediction is an important problem in different science domains. In this
paper, we focus on trend prediction in complex networks, i.e. to identify the
most popular nodes in the future. Due to the preferential attachment mechanism
in real systems, nodes' recent degree and cumulative degree have been
successfully applied to design trend prediction methods. Here we took into
account more detailed information about the network evolution and proposed a
temporal-based predictor (TBP). The TBP predicts the future trend by the node
strength in the weighted network with the link weight equal to its exponential
aging. Three data sets with time information are used to test the performance
of the new method. We find that TBP have high general accuracy in predicting
the future most popular nodes. More importantly, it can identify many potential
objects with low popularity in the past but high popularity in the future. The
effect of the decay speed in the exponential aging on the results is discussed
in detail
Trends Prediction Using Social Diffusion Models
The importance of the ability of predict trends in social media has been
growing rapidly in the past few years with the growing dominance of social
media in our everyday's life. Whereas many works focus on the detection of
anomalies in networks, there exist little theoretical work on the prediction of
the likelihood of anomalous network pattern to globally spread and become
"trends". In this work we present an analytic model the social diffusion
dynamics of spreading network patterns. Our proposed method is based on
information diffusion models, and is capable of predicting future trends based
on the analysis of past social interactions between the community's members. We
present an analytic lower bound for the probability that emerging trends would
successful spread through the network. We demonstrate our model using two
comprehensive social datasets - the "Friends and Family" experiment that was
held in MIT for over a year, where the complete activity of 140 users was
analyzed, and a financial dataset containing the complete activities of over
1.5 million members of the "eToro" social trading community.Comment: 6 Pages + Appendi
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