We propose a new way of imagining and measuring opinions emerging from social media. As people tend to connect with like-minded others and express opinions in response to current events on social media, social media public opinion is naturally occurring, temporally sensitive, and inherently social. Our framework for measuring social media public opinion first samples targeted nodes from a large social graph and identifies homogeneous, interactive, and stable networks of actors, which we call “flocks,” based on social network structure, and then measures and presents opinions of flocks. We apply this framework to Twitter and provide empirical evidence for flocks being meaningful units of analysis and flock membership predicting opinion expression. Through contextualizing social media public opinion by foregrounding the various homogeneous networks it is embedded in, we highlight the need to go beyond the aggregate-level measurement of social media public opinion and study the social dynamics of opinion expression using social media.
Poster abstract: Homophily and controversy: On the role of public opinion in online viral diffusion
It is critical in social network analysis to understand the underlying mechanisms of online information diffusion. Although there has been much progress on the influential factors that lead to online viral diffusion, little is known about the impact by public opinion. In this paper, we examine the relations between the public opinion among information propagators and the virality of online diffusion based on a large-scale real-world dataset. We propose a set of new metrics for public opinion in online diffusion to reveal their correlation with diffusion structural virality, and further apply our understanding to predict diffusion virality based on public opinion. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed analysis in the prediction of viral diffusion events.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1662487
- PAR ID:
- 10127235
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 2
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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