4,380 research outputs found
Elite Tweets: Analysing the Twitter Communication Patterns of Labour Party Peers in the House of Lords
The micro-blogging platform Twitter has gained notoriety for its status as both a communication channel between private individuals, and as a public forum monitored by journalists, the public, and the state. Its potential application for political communication has not gone unnoticed; politicians have used Twitter to attract voters, interact with constituencies and advance issue-based campaigns. This article reports on the preliminary results of the research teamâs work with 21 peers sitting on the Labour frontbench. It is based on the monitoring and archival of the peersâ activity on Twitter for a period of 100 days from 16th May to 28th September 2012. Using a sample of more than 4,363 tweets and a mixed methodology combining semantic analysis, social network analysis and quantitative analysis, this paper explores the peersâ patterns of usage and communication on Twitter. Key findings are that as a tweeting community their behavior is consistent with others, however there is evidence that a coherent strategy is lacking. Labour peers tend to work in ego networks of self-interest as opposed to working together to promote party polic
Who Contributes to the Knowledge Sharing Economy?
Information sharing dynamics of social networks rely on a small set of
influencers to effectively reach a large audience. Our recent results and
observations demonstrate that the shape and identity of this elite, especially
those contributing \emph{original} content, is difficult to predict.
Information acquisition is often cited as an example of a public good. However,
this emerging and powerful theory has yet to provably offer qualitative
insights on how specialization of users into active and passive participants
occurs.
This paper bridges, for the first time, the theory of public goods and the
analysis of diffusion in social media. We introduce a non-linear model of
\emph{perishable} public goods, leveraging new observations about sharing of
media sources. The primary contribution of this work is to show that
\emph{shelf time}, which characterizes the rate at which content get renewed,
is a critical factor in audience participation. Our model proves a fundamental
\emph{dichotomy} in information diffusion: While short-lived content has simple
and predictable diffusion, long-lived content has complex specialization. This
occurs even when all information seekers are \emph{ex ante} identical and could
be a contributing factor to the difficulty of predicting social network
participation and evolution.Comment: 15 pages in ACM Conference on Online Social Networks 201
Characterizing Key Stakeholders in an Online Black-Hat Marketplace
Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that
facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook
likes, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO), or bogus Amazon reviews. In
order to deploy effective technical and legal countermeasures, it is important
to understand how these black-hat marketplaces operate, shedding light on the
services they offer, who is selling, who is buying, what are they buying, who
is more successful, why are they successful, etc. Toward this goal, in this
paper, we present a detailed micro-economic analysis of a popular online
black-hat marketplace, namely, SEOClerks.com. As the site provides
non-anonymized transaction information, we set to analyze selling and buying
behavior of individual users, propose a strategy to identify key users, and
study their tactics as compared to other (non-key) users. We find that key
users: (1) are mostly located in Asian countries, (2) are focused more on
selling black-hat SEO services, (3) tend to list more lower priced services,
and (4) sometimes buy services from other sellers and then sell at higher
prices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis with respect to
devising effective economic and legal intervention strategies against
marketplace operators and key users.Comment: 12th IEEE/APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2017
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