Who Will Retweet This? Detecting Strangers from Twitter to Retweet Information

Abstract

There has been much effort on studying how social media sites, such as Twitter, help propagate information in different situations, including spreading alerts and SOS messages in an emergency. However, existing work has not addressed how to actively identify and engage the right strangers at the right time on social media to help effectively propagate intended information within a desired time frame. To address this problem, we have developed three models: (1) a feature-based model that leverages people's exhibited social behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interactions, to characterize their willingness and readiness to propagate information on Twitter via the act of retweeting; (2) a wait-time model based on a user's previous retweeting wait times to predict his or her next retweeting time when asked; and (3) a subset selection model that automatically selects a subset of people from a set of available people using probabilities predicted by the feature-based model and maximizes retweeting rate. Based on these three models, we build a recommender system that predicts the likelihood of a stranger to retweet information when asked, within a specific time window, and recommends the top-N qualified strangers to engage with. Our experiments, including live studies in the real world, demonstrate the effectiveness of our work.

Questionnaire Testing: Identifying Twitter User's Information Sharing Behavior during Disasters

“…In addition, about 75% of the question items used in this survey derived from brainstorming. The 5 factors derived supported the findings from previous literature on reasons people spread crisis information such as trustworthiness of the tweet content [38], content relevant [38], the act of spreading trending topics [4], pro-social behaviour during disasters [39] and the desire to spread valuable, helpful, and important information to society [13], [38]. Thus, the questionnaire we produced is better to measure and useful for other researcher to understand user's information sharing behavior during disasters, since it is also consistent with the literature.…”

Why I Retweet? Exploring Users Perspective on Decision-Making of Information Spreading during Disasters

“…It includes the information from people they trust, information with proof (picture or video), and early information which is helpful such as early information for safety status check. Similarly, previous studies also highlight content relevance as the reason for retweeting during disasters [38].…”

“…Most of the work highlights that why people retweet is based on what they retweet. During emergencies, people often retweet information that they feel is valuable and important for others to know, even upon the request of a stranger [37,38].…”

Twitter Can Predict Your Next Place of Visit

“…For deriving personality traits Linguist Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) [20] had been used frequently. References [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] have shown that lexicons used by people can be used for understanding their personal values and how to use these traits for a recommendation. Though all these approaches have been used extensively in analyzing personality traits, these also have shortcomings of predefined word category correlation.…”