No Arabic abstract
We study the relationship between the sentiment levels of Twitter users and the evolving network structure that the users created by @-mentioning each other. We use a large dataset of tweets to which we apply three sentiment scoring algorithms, including the open source SentiStrength program. Specifically we make three contributions. Firstly we find that people who have potentially the largest communication reach (according to a dynamic centrality measure) use sentiment differently than the average user: for example they use positive sentiment more often and negative sentiment less often. Secondly we find that when we follow structurally stable Twitter communities over a period of months, their sentiment levels are also stable, and sudden changes in community sentiment from one day to the next can in most cases be traced to external events affecting the community. Thirdly, based on our findings, we create and calibrate a simple agent-based model that is capable of reproducing measures of emotive response comparable to those obtained from our empirical dataset.
Social Media offer a vast amount of geo-located and time-stamped textual content directly generated by people. This information can be analysed to obtain insights about the general state of a large population of users and to address scientific questions from a diversity of disciplines. In this work, we estimate temporal patterns of mood variation through the use of emotionally loaded words contained in Twitter messages, possibly reflecting underlying circadian and seasonal rhythms in the mood of the users. We present a method for computing mood scores from text using affective word taxonomies, and apply it to millions of tweets collected in the United Kingdom during the seasons of summer and winter. Our analysis results in the detection of strong and statistically significant circadian patterns for all the investigated mood types. Seasonal variation does not seem to register any important divergence in the signals, but a periodic oscillation within a 24-hour period is identified for each mood type. The main common characteristic for all emotions is their mid-morning peak, however their mood score patterns differ in the evenings.
While social networks can provide an ideal platform for up-to-date information from individuals across the world, it has also proved to be a place where rumours fester and accidental or deliberate misinformation often emerges. In this article, we aim to support the task of making sense from social media data, and specifically, seek to build an autonomous message-classifier that filters relevant and trustworthy information from Twitter. For our work, we collected about 100 million public tweets, including users past tweets, from which we identified 72 rumours (41 true, 31 false). We considered over 80 trustworthiness measures including the authors profile and past behaviour, the social network connections (graphs), and the content of tweets themselves. We ran modern machine-learning classifiers over those measures to produce trustworthiness scores at various time windows from the outbreak of the rumour. Such time-windows were key as they allowed useful insight into the progression of the rumours. From our findings, we identified that our model was significantly more accurate than similar studies in the literature. We also identified critical attributes of the data that give rise to the trustworthiness scores assigned. Finally we developed a software demonstration that provides a visual user interface to allow the user to examine the analysis.
In online social media systems users are not only posting, consuming, and resharing content, but also creating new and destroying existing connections in the underlying social network. While each of these two types of dynamics has individually been studied in the past, much less is known about the connection between the two. How does user information posting and seeking behavior interact with the evolution of the underlying social network structure? Here, we study ways in which network structure reacts to users posting and sharing content. We examine the complete dynamics of the Twitter information network, where users post and reshare information while they also create and destroy connections. We find that the dynamics of network structure can be characterized by steady rates of change, interrupted by sudden bursts. Information diffusion in the form of cascades of post re-sharing often creates such sudden bursts of new connections, which significantly change users local network structure. These bursts transform users networks of followers to become structurally more cohesive as well as more homogenous in terms of follower interests. We also explore the effect of the information content on the dynamics of the network and find evidence that the appearance of new topics and real-world events can lead to significant changes in edge creations and deletions. Lastly, we develop a model that quantifies the dynamics of the network and the occurrence of these bursts as a function of the information spreading through the network. The model can successfully predict which information diffusion events will lead to bursts in network dynamics.
Hundreds of thousands of hashtags are generated every day on Twitter. Only a few become bursting topics. Among the few, only some can be predicted in real-time. In this paper, we take the initiative to conduct a systematic study of a series of challenging real-time prediction problems of bursting hashtags. Which hashtags will become bursting? If they do, when will the burst happen? How long will they remain active? And how soon will they fade away? Based on empirical analysis of real data from Twitter, we provide insightful statistics to answer these questions, which span over the entire lifecycles of hashtags.
Background. In Italy, in recent years, vaccination coverage for key immunizations as MMR has been declining to worryingly low levels. In 2017, the Italian Govt expanded the number of mandatory immunizations introducing penalties to unvaccinated childrens families. During the 2018 general elections campaign, immunization policy entered the political debate with the Govt in charge blaming oppositions for fuelling vaccine scepticism. A new Govt established in 2018 temporarily relaxed penalties. Objectives and Methods. Using a sentiment analysis on tweets posted in Italian during 2018, we aimed to: (i) characterize the temporal flow of vaccines communication on Twitter (ii) evaluate the polarity of vaccination opinions and usefulness of Twitter data to estimate vaccination parameters, and (iii) investigate whether the contrasting announcements at the highest political level might have originated disorientation amongst the Italian public. Results. Vaccine-relevant tweeters interactions peaked in response to main political events. Out of retained tweets, 70.0% resulted favourable to vaccination, 16.5% unfavourable, and 13.6% undecided, respectively. The smoothed time series of polarity proportions exhibit frequent large changes in the favourable proportion, enhanced by an up and down trend synchronized with the switch between govt suggesting evidence of disorientation among the public. Conclusion. The reported evidence of disorientation documents that critical immunization topics, should never be used for political consensus. This is especially true given the increasing role of online social media as information source, which might yield to social pressures eventually harmful for vaccine uptake, and is worsened by the lack of institutional presence on Twitter, calling for efforts to contrast misinformation and the ensuing spread of hesitancy.