Information resonance on Twitter

Abstract

Twitter has undoubtedly caught the attention of both the general public, and academia as a microblogging service worthy of study and attention. Twitter has several features that sets it apart from other social media/networking sites, including its 140 character limit on each user's message (tweet), and the unique combination of avenues via which information is shared: directed social network of friends and followers, where messages posted by a user is broadcast to all its followers, and the public timeline, which provides real time access to posts or tweets on specific topics for everyone. While the character limit plays a role in shaping the type of messages that are posted and shared, the dual mode of sharing information (public vs posts to one's followers) provides multiple pathways in which a posting can propagate through the user landscape via forwarding or "Retweets", leading us to ask the following questions: How does a message resonate and spread widely among the users on Twitter, and are the resulting cascade dynamics different due to the unique features of Twitter? What role does content of a message play in its popularity? Realizing that tweet content would play a major role in the information propagation dynamics (as borne out by the empirical results reported in this paper), we focused on patterns of information propagation on Twitter by observing the sharing and reposting of messages around a specific topic, i.e. the Iranian election.