A study on the characteristics of spreading news on Twitter : The influence social media has on society

Abstract: The spreading of news on social media is a complex process and sought-after skill in today’s society. People spreading political beliefs, marketing teams who want to make money and people who want to achieve fame are all trying to understand the best way to influence others. Many are trying to understand this complex process to limit the impact that the spreading of fake news and other misinformation may have on society. This re- search has gained a lot of attention recently, but no definite answers to several important questions have been found. Our main contribution is to create a methodology that allows us to collect more interesting longitudinal data, while at the same time reducing the number of calls to the used APIs. This is done by introducing a threshold that filters out links that are found to be uninteresting. We also introduce a random factor in order to eliminate and understand the bias introduced with this threshold. Our analysis of the longitudinal measurement show that there is no strong correlation between the number of followers a user has and the number of clicks a link posted by the user receives and that a link’s popularity typically is reduced significantly after its first few hours of existence. This illustrates the reactive and fast-paced nature of Twitter as a means to share information.