Users' participation and social influence during information spreading on Twitter

PLoS One. 2017 Sep 13;12(9):e0183290. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183290. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Online Social Networks generate a prodigious wealth of real-time information at an incessant rate. In this paper we study the empirical data that crawled from Twitter to describe the topology and information spreading dynamics of Online Social Networks. We propose a measurement with three measures to state the efforts of users on Twitter to get their information spreading, based on the unique mechanisms for information retransmission on Twitter. It is noticed that small fraction of users with special performance on participation can gain great influence, while most other users play a role as middleware during the information propagation. Thus a community analysis is performed and four categories of users are found with different kinds of participation that cause the information dissemination dynamics. These suggest that exiting topological measures alone may reflect little about the influence of individuals and provide new insights for information spreading.

MeSH terms

  • Community Participation* / methods
  • Community Participation* / statistics & numerical data
  • Humans
  • Information Dissemination / methods*
  • Internet*
  • Models, Statistical
  • Social Change*
  • Social Desirability
  • Social Media* / statistics & numerical data
  • Social Networking

Grants and funding

This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract Nos. 11421505.