4,923 research outputs found
Using Text Similarity to Detect Social Interactions not Captured by Formal Reply Mechanisms
In modeling social interaction online, it is important to understand when
people are reacting to each other. Many systems have explicit indicators of
replies, such as threading in discussion forums or replies and retweets in
Twitter. However, it is likely these explicit indicators capture only part of
people's reactions to each other, thus, computational social science approaches
that use them to infer relationships or influence are likely to miss the mark.
This paper explores the problem of detecting non-explicit responses, presenting
a new approach that uses tf-idf similarity between a user's own tweets and
recent tweets by people they follow. Based on a month's worth of posting data
from 449 ego networks in Twitter, this method demonstrates that it is likely
that at least 11% of reactions are not captured by the explicit reply and
retweet mechanisms. Further, these uncaptured reactions are not evenly
distributed between users: some users, who create replies and retweets without
using the official interface mechanisms, are much more responsive to followees
than they appear. This suggests that detecting non-explicit responses is an
important consideration in mitigating biases and building more accurate models
when using these markers to study social interaction and information diffusion.Comment: A final version of this work was published in the 2015 IEEE 11th
International Conference on e-Science (e-Science
Cascades: A view from Audience
Cascades on online networks have been a popular subject of study in the past
decade, and there is a considerable literature on phenomena such as diffusion
mechanisms, virality, cascade prediction, and peer network effects. However, a
basic question has received comparatively little attention: how desirable are
cascades on a social media platform from the point of view of users? While
versions of this question have been considered from the perspective of the
producers of cascades, any answer to this question must also take into account
the effect of cascades on their audience. In this work, we seek to fill this
gap by providing a consumer perspective of cascade.
Users on online networks play the dual role of producers and consumers.
First, we perform an empirical study of the interaction of Twitter users with
retweet cascades. We measure how often users observe retweets in their home
timeline, and observe a phenomenon that we term the "Impressions Paradox": the
share of impressions for cascades of size k decays much slower than frequency
of cascades of size k. Thus, the audience for cascades can be quite large even
for rare large cascades. We also measure audience engagement with retweet
cascades in comparison to non-retweeted content. Our results show that cascades
often rival or exceed organic content in engagement received per impression.
This result is perhaps surprising in that consumers didn't opt in to see tweets
from these authors. Furthermore, although cascading content is widely popular,
one would expect it to eventually reach parts of the audience that may not be
interested in the content. Motivated by our findings, we posit a theoretical
model that focuses on the effect of cascades on the audience. Our results on
this model highlight the balance between retweeting as a high-quality content
selection mechanism and the role of network users in filtering irrelevant
content
Efficiency of Human Activity on Information Spreading on Twitter
Understanding the collective reaction to individual actions is key to
effectively spread information in social media. In this work we define
efficiency on Twitter, as the ratio between the emergent spreading process and
the activity employed by the user. We characterize this property by means of a
quantitative analysis of the structural and dynamical patterns emergent from
human interactions, and show it to be universal across several Twitter
conversations. We found that some influential users efficiently cause
remarkable collective reactions by each message sent, while the majority of
users must employ extremely larger efforts to reach similar effects. Next we
propose a model that reproduces the retweet cascades occurring on Twitter to
explain the emergent distribution of the user efficiency. The model shows that
the dynamical patterns of the conversations are strongly conditioned by the
topology of the underlying network. We conclude that the appearance of a small
fraction of extremely efficient users results from the heterogeneity of the
followers network and independently of the individual user behavior.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure
Trends in Social Media : Persistence and Decay
Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an
incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few
topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become
temporal trends which are displayed to users. The question of what factors
cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not
been answered yet. In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending
topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation,
persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors
such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to
trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the
content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing
trends
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
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