ow.ly/pbwxd Revealed: Most Influential Emotions on Social Networks One well-known feature of social networks is that similar people tend to attract each other: birds of a feather flock together. So an interesting question is whether these similarities cause people to behave in the same way online — whether it might lead to flocking or herding behavior, for example. Today, we get an interesting insight into this phenomena thanks to the work of Rui Fan and colleagues at Beihang University in China. They have compared the way that tweets labeled with specific emotions influence other people on the network. And their conclusion is surprising. They say the results clearly show that anger is more influential than other emotions such as joy or sadness, a finding that could have significant implications for our understanding of the way information spreads through social networks. The researchers got their data from Weibo, a Twitter-like service that has become hugely popular in China. In just four years, it has attracted more than 500 million users who post about 100 million messages a day. During six months in 2010, the group collected some 70 million tweets from 200,000 users and constructed a social network in which users are linked if they mutually interact by sending messages to each other or retweeting each other, for example. To ensure they only studied people who were strongly connected, they only included people who had more than 30 interactions during the test period. Next, they determined the sentiment of each tweet in their database by analyzing the emoticons they contained. They divided these into four categories, expressing joy, sadness, anger or disgust. Finally, the group studied the way sentiments spread through the network. For example, if one person sent an angry tweet, how likely was it that a recipient would also send an angry message, and how likely was it that the recipient of this message would pass on the same sentiment.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 03:18:42 +0000
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