In theory, a major advantage to the big data approach in studying online communities is that it should be possible to collect a representative random sample from a broadly defined population. However, in practice, data collection processes are not formalized, even for famous social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. As a result, there is ambiguity left on questions such as "how much data is enough?" and how representative are the samples of the broader population being studied in online social networks. In this paper, I propose a focused back-and-forth crawl approach and a validated seed choice method for collecting network-level data from Twitter. The proposed crawl method can extract community structures without needing a complete network graph for the Twitter network and validate its size using "reference score". It also takes care of the sampling size problem in Twitter by tracking the percentage of known nodes that have been included in the data. Thus, solving most major problems in Twitter data collection procedures and moving a step further to formalizing data collection methods for the platform. Once the communities are crawled, and the network graph is clean and complete; it is then possible to train Machine Learning classifiers using communities as features to predict political affiliations of users on a larger scale. As a case, I used the proposed method for separating French political communities on Twitter from the global Twitter community and knowing the political affiliations of users on a continuous scale.
The popularity of the online media-driven social network relation is proven in today's digital era. The many challenges that these emergence has created include a huge growing network of social relations, and the large amount of data which is continuously been generated via the different platform of social networking sites, viz. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. These data are Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of the users which are also publicly available for some platform, and others allow with some restricted permission to download it for research purposes. The users' acc…
Interaction networks are generally much less homophilic than affiliation networks, accommodating for many more cross-cutting links. By statistically assigning a political valence to users from their network-level affiliation patterns, and by further contrasting interaction and affiliation (quotes and retweets) within specific discursive events, namely quote trees, we describe a variety of cross-cutting patterns which significantly nuance the traditional "echo chamber" narrative.
Twitter is a social network that offers a rich and interesting source of information challenging to retrieve and analyze. Twitter data can be accessed using a REST API. The available operations allow retrieving tweets on the basis of a set of keywords but with limitations such as the number of calls per minute and the size of results. Besides, there is no control on retrieved results and finding tweets which are relevant to a specific topic is a big issue. Given these limitations, it is important that the query keywords cover unambiguously the topic of interest in order to both reach the relev…
The need for a comprehensive study to explore various aspects of online social media has been instigated by many researchers. This paper gives an insight into the social platform, Twitter. In this present work, we have illustrated stepwise procedure for crawling the data and discuss the key issues related to extracting associated features that can be useful in Twitter-related research while crawling these data from Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Further, the data that comprises of over 86 million tweets have been analysed from various perspective including the most used languages, …
We explore the understudied area of social payments to evaluate whether or not we can predict the gender and political affiliation of Venmo users based on the content of their Venmo transactions. Latent attribute detection has been successfully applied in the domain of studying social media. However, there remains a dearth of previous work using data other than Twitter. There is also a continued need for studies which explore mobile payments spaces like Venmo, which remain understudied due to the lack of data access. We hypothesize that using methods similar to latent attribute analysis with T…
North American institutions of higher education (IHEs): universities, 4- and 2-year colleges, and trade schools -- are heavily present and followed on Twitter. An IHE Twitter account, on average, has 20,000 subscribers. Many of them follow more than one IHE, making it possible to construct an IHE network, based on the number of co-followers. In this paper, we explore the structure of a network of 1,435 IHEs on Twitter. We discovered significant correlations between the network attributes: various centralities and clustering coefficients -- and IHEs' attributes, such as enrollment, tuition, and…
Wroclaw University of Science and Technology（弗罗茨瓦夫理工大学）
Every day, the world is flooded by millions of messages and statements posted on Twitter or Facebook. Social media platforms try to protect users' personal data, but there still is a real risk of misuse, including elections manipulation. Did you know, that only 13 posts addressing important or controversial topics for society are enough to predict one's political affiliation with a 0.85 F1-score? To examine this phenomenon, we created a novel universal method of semi-automated political leaning discovery. It relies on a heuristical data annotation procedure, which was evaluated to achieve 0.95…
Online social networks have emerged as useful tools to communicate or share information and news on a daily basis. One of the most popular networks is Twitter, where users connect to each other via directed follower relationships. Researchers have studied Twitter follower graphs and described them with various topological features. Collecting Twitter data, especially crawling the followers of users, is a tedious and time-consuming process and the data needs to be treated carefully due to its sensitive nature, containing personal user information. We therefore aim at the fast generation of synt…
Leveraging Content Producer Networks and User Perception to Detect Online Discursive Communities
National Research Council of Italy, Institute for Applied Mathematics（意大利国家研究委员会应用数学研究所）；LUISS “Guido Carli” University（卢伊斯·圭多·卡尔利大学）；National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Complex Systems（意大利国家研究委员会复杂系统研究所）；Ca’ Foscari University of Venice（威尼斯卡福斯卡里大学）；London Institute for Mathematical Sciences（伦敦数学科学研究所）；“Enrico Fermi” Research Center（恩里科·费米研究中心）；IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca（卢卡高等研究学院）
