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Interoperability of a Social Media Observatory

Karissa McKelveyAnd Filippo Menczer

Center for Complex Networks and Systems ResearchSchool of Informatics and Computing

Indiana University, Bloomington

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Can we use social media as laboratories for social

science?

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Political Polarization on Twitter Michael Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Bruno Gonçalves, Alessandro Flammini & Filippo Menczer International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2011

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Competition for attention

Competitions among topics in a world with limited attention Nature Scientific Report, 2012. Lilian Weng, Alessandro Flammini, Alessandro Vespignani and Filippo Menczer.

#jan25

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More Tweets, More Votes

DiGrazia, Joseph, McKelvey, Karissa, Bollen, Johan and Rojas, Fabio. More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior (February 21, 2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2235423 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2235423

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astroturf

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Data “mine” ing

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Data “ours” ing

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Infrastructure

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Infrastructure

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Data Collection

• Twitter Streaming API

• August, 2010 – present

• 5TB Compressed

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Real-Time Filtering

• Past 90 days

• US Politics 2012, Social Movements, News

• MySQL database + website

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Infrastructure

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Model

• Events– Post on a social media site

• Users– Actors in the post– Sender, receiver, forwarder, etc

• Meme– Discernable unit of information transfer

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Meme

Hashtag

User

URL

Phrase

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Building the Network

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Retweet (forward) Mention (conversation)

celebrities

spam

astroturf

politics

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politics

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#tcot

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celebrities

politics

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@barackobama

celebrities

spam

astroturf

politics

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@bek_rt

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Infrastructure

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Infrastructure

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API & Website

• Filterable and searchable interface to find memes of interest

• Endpoints for users to access data programmatically

• Visualizations (saw earlier)

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Further Thoughts

• Potential uses:– Pedagogy– Prototyping– Research

• Terms of Service– Tweet text– Derived Data

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ThanksPapers at cnets.indiana.edu/groups/nan/truthy

Sandro Flammini

Bruno Conçalves

Jacob Ratkiewicz

Lilian Weng

Mike Conover

Johan Bollen

Przemek Grabowicz

Mark Meiss

Alex Vespignani

Alex Rudnick

Luca Aiello

Filippo Menczer