The rich and middle classes on Twitter: Are popular users indeed different from regular users?
| Autor: | Anirban Mahanti, Amitabha Bagchi, Aaditeshwar Seth, Amit Ruhela |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
education.field_of_study
Social network Computer Networks and Communications Computer science business.industry Event (computing) 05 social sciences Internet privacy Population 050801 communication & media studies 020206 networking & telecommunications 02 engineering and technology Popularity 0508 media and communications 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering business education |
| Zdroj: | Computer Communications. 73:219-228 |
| ISSN: | 0140-3664 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.comcom.2015.07.024 |
| Popis: | Popular users tweet slightly earlier than ordinary users during the growth of Twitter eventsPopular users engage with a Twitter event for slightly longer than ordinary usersPopular users write more original tweets than retweets, while the trend is the reverse for ordinary usersTweets by popular users are retweeted more than tweets by ordinary usersPopular users are the quickest to retweet tweetsThe volume of tweeting by popular users is however not different from that of ordinary usersPopular users also do not seem to have an influence on the event growth ratesEventual popularity attained by an event is positively correlated with participation by popular users, but causality is hard to establish Online social networking (OSN) websites such as Twitter and Facebook are known to have a wide heterogeneity in the popularity of their users, which is counted typically in terms of the number of followers or friends of the users. We add to the large body of work on information diffusion on online social networking websites, by studying how the behavior of the small minority of very popular users on Twitter differs from that of the bulk of the population of ordinary users, and how these differences may impact information diffusion. Our findings are somewhat counter intuitive. We find that on aggregate metrics such as the tweeting volume and degree of participation on different topics, popular users and ordinary users seem similar to each other. We also find that although popular users do seem to command an influential position in driving the popularity of topics on Twitter, in practice they do not affect growth rates of user participation and the causality of popular users driving event popularity is hard to establish. Our observations corroborate the findings of other researchers who show that user popularity in terms of number of followers does not translate into driving event popularity, but that event popularity may be driven by extraneous factors to do with the importance of the event. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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