EAPSI:Investigating Social Influence Dynamics of Retweet Interactions on Chinese Microblogging Platform, Weibo

Glenski Maria, South Bend IN

Investigators

Abstract

Society increasingly relies on social platforms such as microblogging sites for the basis of decision making and as news sources. Reviews, ratings, and comments on these platforms are used to decide which news story to read, product to buy, or service to use. The reliance on crowd-sourced opinion and information to make decisions or form opinions leaves users vulnerable to social influence. The high use of microblogging sites such as Twitter and Weibo to broadcast and receive such crowd-sourced and crowd-aggregated information increases the importance of discovering how social influence impacts users on microblogging platforms. The project will investigate how social influence affects users of Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform, through an analysis of how links formed by retweet interactions evolve over time. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Jie Tang at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Dr. Tang is an expert on social network analysis and will provide access to unique Weibo retweet data to support the analysis. Analysis of the evolution of connections over time will be completed using a graph representation of user connections through retweet interactions. Since social influence dynamics can affect and be affected by the temporal aspect of user interactions, these graphs will be time dependent so as to effectively represent how the connections between users grows over time. Analysis will consider factors such as the number of shared sibling nodes (in this case, users who have "retweet" interactions with a given user), the time at which interactions took place, the time lapse between the original posting and the reposting of content, and the newly shared sibling nodes after the "retweet" interaction occurred. This NSF EAPSI award supports the research of a U.S. graduate student and is funded in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.