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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 13: Focus Session: Opinion Formation

SOE 13.3: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 19. März 2020, 10:00–10:15, GÖR 226

User interactions on Twitter: Retweet versus reply networks — •Felix Gaisbauer, Armin Pournaki, Sven Banisch, and Eckehard Olbrich — Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

User interaction on social media platforms, especially on Twitter, has been used extensively to monitor and analyse the spectra of political opinion and often serves as an empirical basis for modelling and investigating opinion dynamics. But previous studies on polarization and user interaction on Twitter have mainly focused on so-called retweet networks. There, separate clusters of users, which share content of each other, might be identified, and users of each cluster can then be assigned a certain political leaning on the topic under investigation.[1] We will show in this contribution that a retweet network alone often lacks crucial information about political discourse: It does not capture direct response patterns between users in general and specifically between users of different opinion groups. The communication (or lack thereof), apart from the simple information transfer by retweeting, is missed. Information about this type of interaction can be gathered with a reply network, constructed from the replies of users between each other. We analyse, among others, tweets about the Saxonian state elections of 2019 in order to substantiate this claim.

[1] Conover et al.: Political Polarization on Twitter. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2011)