What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? | Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (2025)

research-article

Authors: Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, Sue Moon

WWW '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web

Pages 591 - 600

Published: 26 April 2010 Publication History

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Abstract

Twitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal of this paper is to study the topological characteristics of Twitter and its power as a new medium of information sharing.

We have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41.7 million user profiles, 1.47 billion social relations, 4,262 trending topics, and 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a non-power-law follower distribution, a short effective diameter, and low reciprocity, which all mark a deviation from known characteristics of human social networks [28]. In order to identify influentials on Twitter, we have ranked users by the number of followers and by PageRank and found two rankings to be similar. Ranking by retweets differs from the previous two rankings, indicating a gap in influence inferred from the number of followers and that from the popularity of one's tweets. We have analyzed the tweets of top trending topics and reported on their temporal behavior and user participation. We have classified the trending topics based on the active period and the tweets and show that the majority (over 85%) of topics are headline news or persistent news in nature. A closer look at retweets reveals that any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet.

To the best of our knowledge this work is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it.

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  • Velasco-López JCarrasco RSerrano-Guerrero JChiclana F(2024)Profiling Social Sentiment in Times of Health Emergencies with Information from Social Networks and Official StatisticsMathematics10.3390/math1206091112:6(911)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
  • KARACA NAYAS O(2024)Identification of Domain-specific Opinion Leaders in X/TwitterX/Twitter'da Alana Özgü Kanaat Önderlerinin Belirlenmesiİçtimaiyat10.33709/ictimaiyat.1404626Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
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Index Terms

  1. What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?

    1. Applied computing

      1. Law, social and behavioral sciences

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    Published In

    What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? | Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (5)

    WWW '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web

    April 2010

    1407 pages

    ISBN:9781605587998

    DOI:10.1145/1772690

    • General Chairs:
    • Michael Rappa

      North Carolina State University, USA

      ,
    • Paul Jones

      University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

      ,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Juliana Freire

      University of Utah, USA

      ,
    • Soumen Chakrabarti

      Indian Institute of Technology, India

    Copyright © 2010 International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 26 April 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. Twitter
    2. degree of separation
    3. homophily
    4. influential
    5. information diffusion
    6. online social network
    7. pagerank
    8. reciprocity
    9. retweet

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    • Research-article

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    WWW '10

    WWW '10: The 19th International World Wide Web Conference

    April 26 - 30, 2010

    North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? | Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (10)

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    • Velasco-López JCarrasco RSerrano-Guerrero JChiclana F(2024)Profiling Social Sentiment in Times of Health Emergencies with Information from Social Networks and Official StatisticsMathematics10.3390/math1206091112:6(911)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
    • KARACA NAYAS O(2024)Identification of Domain-specific Opinion Leaders in X/TwitterX/Twitter'da Alana Özgü Kanaat Önderlerinin Belirlenmesiİçtimaiyat10.33709/ictimaiyat.1404626Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
    • Uikey SParmar U(2024)AN IN-DEPTH EXPLORATION INTO RELATIONSHIP OF SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING: AN INSIGHTFUL PERSPECTIVE OF NETWORKING SOCIETYShodhKosh: Journal of Visual and Performing Arts10.29121/shodhkosh.v5.i2.2024.8965:2Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
    • Han ZShi LLiu LJiang LFang JLin FZhang JPanneerselvam JAntonopoulos N(2024)A Survey on Event Tracking in Social Media Data StreamsBig Data Mining and Analytics10.26599/BDMA.2023.90200217:1(217-243)Online publication date: Mar-2024
    • Mohamed AAlnor NMohammed OAl-Matari EAlhebri AAhmed A(2024)The impact of information technology governance according to the COBIT on performanceInternational Journal of ADVANCED AND APPLIED SCIENCES10.21833/ijaas.2024.03.01411:3(127-136)Online publication date: Mar-2024
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