Fragile online relationship: A first look at unfollow dynamics in Twitter

• Main Authors: KWAK, Haewoon, CHUN, Hyunwoo, MOON, Sue.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
• Subjects: unfollow; computer-mediated communication; Twitter; online relationship; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6099; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7102/viewcontent/1978942.1979104.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as 'unfollow' in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees' informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.They unfollowed those who left many tweets within a short time, created tweets about uninteresting topics, or tweeted about the mundane details of their lives. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic study of the unfollow behavior in Twitter.