Information Propagation in Twitter’s Network
From the post:
It’s well-known that Twitter’s most powerful use is as tool for real-time journalism. Trying to understand its social connections and outstanding capacity to propagate information, we have developed a mathematical model to identify the evolution of a single tweet.
The way a tweet is spread through the network is closely related with Twitter’s retweet functionality, but retweet information is fairly incomplete due to the fight for earning credit/users by means of being the original source/author. We have taken into consideration this behavior and our approach uses text similarity measures as complement of retweet information. In addition, #hashtags and urls are included in the process since they have an important role in Twitter’s information propagation.
Once we designed (and implemented) our mathematical model, we tested it with some Twitter’s topics we had tracked using a visualization tool (Life of a Tweet) . Our conclusiones after the experiments were:
- Twitter’s real propagation is based on information (tweets’ content) and not on Twitter’s structure (retweet).
- Based on we can detect Twitter’s real propagation, we can retrieve Twitter’s real networks.
- Text similarity scores allow us to select how fuzzy are the tweet’s connections and, in extension, the network’s connections. This means that we can set a minimun threshold to determine when two tweets contain the same concept.
Interesting. Useful for anyone who want to grab “real” connections and networks to create topics for merging further information about the same.
You may want to also look at: Meme Diffusion Through Mass Social Media which is about a $900K NSF project on tracking memes through social media.
Admittedly an important area of research but the results I would view with a great deal of caution. Here’s why:
- Memes travel through news outlets, print, radio, TV, websites
- Memes travel through social outlets, such as churches, synagogues, mosques, social clubs
- Memes travel through business relationships and work places
- Memes travel through family gatherings and relationships
- Memes travel over cell phone conversations as well as tweets
That some social media is easier to obtain and process than others doesn’t make it a reliable basis for decision making.