2011/02/07 by Sitaram Asur, Bernardo A. Huberman, Asur, Sitaram +6 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #cs.CY #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1102.1402
arxiv created 2011/02/07 · openalex publication_date 2011/02/07 · arxiv updated 2011/02/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time content at an incessant rate. From all the content that people create and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise to the top and become temporal trends which are displayed to users. The question of what factors cause the formation and persistence of trends is an important one that has not been answered yet. In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays a major role in causing trends.