On Modeling Virality of Twitter Content

• Main Authors: HOANG, Tuan Anh, LIM, Ee Peng, ACHANANUPARP, Palakorn, JIANG, Jing, ZHU, Feida
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
• Subjects: General Elections; Microblogging; Quantitative indices; Real time; Short message; Singapore; Asian Studies; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1440; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2439/viewcontent/C02___On_Modeling_Virality_of_Twitter_Content__ICADL2011_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Twitter is a popular microblogging site where users can easily use mobile phones or desktop machines to generate short messages to be shared with others in realtime. Twitter has seen heavy usage in many recent international events including Japan earthquake, Iran election, etc. In such events, many tweets may become viral for different reasons. In this paper, we study the virality of socio-political tweet content in the Singapore’s 2011 general election (GE2011). We collected tweet data generated by about 20K Singapore users from 1 April 2011 till 12 May 2011, and the follow relationships among them. We introduce several quantitative indices for measuring the virality of tweets that are retweeted. Using these indices, we identify the most viral messages in GE2011 as well as the users behind them.