Do I Need To Follow You?

Abstract

Pinterest is a Social Network Site (SNS) centered around the curation and sharing of visual content. The site encourages users to form ties with (follow) other users based on mutual interests, and use these ties to discover and share content. In this work, we examine the efficacy and relevance of the Pinterest follow mechanism in driving content discovery and curation. We collect a sample of user activity and find that the vast majority (88%) of the unique users who interact with an average user's content are non-followers. Conversely, only 12.3% of a user's followers interact with any of their pins. Users who discover and repost content from outside their follow network also do not subsequently follow the contributors of that content. Our results strongly suggest that following is neither heavily utilized nor strongly effective for driving content discovery and sharing on Pinterest.

Vaccine Images on Twitter: Analysis of What Images are Shared

“…We found that Twitter is a productive platform for studying visual communication issues surrounding vaccines. This is an important finding because Twitter makes it relatively easy to collect large quantities of image data via the public Twitter API, compared with the lack of Pinterest APIs for creating large, unbiased datasets [65]. Unlike prior work that relied on human analysis of images, we used fully automated analytics to conduct a comprehensive analysis over a large dataset.…”