Artificial Inflation: The Real Story of Trends and Trend-Setters in Sina Weibo

Abstract

There has been a tremendous rise in the growth of online social networks all over the world in recent years. This has resulted in a large amount of content created and propagated at an incessant rate, all competing with each other to attract enough attention and become trends. In this paper, we analyze the temporal aspect of trends and trend-setters in Sina Weibo, contrasting it with earlier observations on Twitter. First, we look at the formation, persistence and decay of trends and examine the key topics that trend in Sina Weibo. We find that retweeting activity is very predominant in Sina Weibo. Furthermore we discover that many of the trends in Sina Weibo are due to continuous retweets by a small percentage of fraudulent accounts set up for the purpose of artificially inflating certain posts.