2011/11/12 by Sebastien Ardon, Amitabha Bagchi, Ardon, Sebastien +11
Computer Science · #82C20 #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.5.4 #K.4 #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #acm:82C20 #cs.CY #cs.SI #msc:82C20
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1111.2904
17 pages, 16 figures
arxiv created 2011/11/15 · arxiv updated 2011/11/16
We present the first comprehensive characterization of the diffusion of ideas on Twitter, studying more than 4000 topics that include both popular and less popular topics. On a data set containing approximately 10 million users and a comprehensive scraping of all the tweets posted by these users between June 2009 and August 2009 (approximately 200 million tweets), we perform a rigorous temporal and spatial analysis, investigating the time-evolving properties of the subgraphs formed by the users discussing each topic. We focus on two different notions of the spatial: the network topology formed by follower-following links on Twitter, and the geospatial location of the users. We investigate the effect of initiators on the popularity of topics and find that users with a high number of followers have a strong impact on popularity. We deduce that topics become popular when disjoint clusters of users discussing them begin to merge and form one giant component that grows to cover a significant fraction of the network. Our geospatial analysis shows that highly popular topics are those that cross regional boundaries aggressively.