Multiple studies in the past have analyzed the role and dynamics of the Twitter social network during real world events. However, little work has explored the content of other social media services, or compared content across two networks during real world events. We believe that social media platforms like Facebook also play a vital role in disseminating information on the Internet during real world events. In this work, we study and characterize the content posted on the world's biggest social network, Facebook, and present a comparative analysis of Facebook and Twitter content posted during 16 real world events. Contrary to existing notion that Facebook is used mostly as a private network, our findings reveal that more than 30 of public content that was present on Facebook during these events, was also present on Twitter. We then performed qualitative analysis on the content spread by the most active users during these events, and found that over 10 of the most active users on both networks post spam content. We used stylometric features from Facebook posts and tweet text to classify this spam content, and were able to achieve an accuracy of over 99 for Facebook, and over 98 for Twitter. This work is aimed at providing researchers with an overview of Facebook content during real world events, and serve as basis for more in-depth exploration of its various aspects like information quality, and credibility during real world events.
In recent years, studying Twitter has been the main focus for researchers in context of real world events. @cite_4 showed a big overlap between real-world news headlines and Twitter's trending topics. Authors of this work crawled the entire Twitter network, and showed that the majority (over 85
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Twitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal of this paper is to study the topological characteristics of Twitter and its power as a new medium of information sharing. We have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41.7 million user profiles, 1.47 billion social relations, 4,262 trending topics, and 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a non-power-law follower distribution, a short effective diameter, and low reciprocity, which all mark a deviation from known characteristics of human social networks [28]. In order to identify influentials on Twitter, we have ranked users by the number of followers and by PageRank and found two rankings to be similar. Ranking by retweets differs from the previous two rankings, indicating a gap in influence inferred from the number of followers and that from the popularity of one's tweets. We have analyzed the tweets of top trending topics and reported on their temporal behavior and user participation. We have classified the trending topics based on the active period and the tweets and show that the majority (over 85 ) of topics are headline news or persistent news in nature. A closer look at retweets reveals that any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet. To the best of our knowledge this work is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it. Once every five minutes, Twitter publishes a list of trending topics by monitoring and analyzing tweets from its users. Similarly, Google makes available hourly a list of hot queries that have been issued to the search engine. We claim that social trends fired by Twitter may help explain and predict web trends derived from Google. Indeed, we argue that information flooding nearly real-time across the Twitter social network could anticipate the set of topics that users will later search on the Web. In this work, we analyze the time series derived from the daily volume index of each trend, either by Twitter or Google. Our study on a real-world dataset reveals that about 26 of the trending topics raising from Twitter “asis” are also found as hot queries issued to Google. Also, we find that about 72 of the similar trends appear first on Twitter. Thus, we assess the relation between comparable Twitter and Google trends by testing three classes of time series regression models. First, we find that Google by its own is not able to effectively predict the time behavior of its trends. Indeed, we show that autoregressive models, which try to fit time series of Google trends, perform poorly. On the other hand, we validate the forecasting power of Twitter by showing that models, which use Google as the dependent variable and Twitter as the explanatory variable, retain as significant the past values of Twitter 60 of times. Moreover, we discover that a Twitter trend causes as imilar Google trend to later occur about 43 of times. In the end, we show that the very best-performing models are those using past values of both Twitter and Google. User-contributed messages on social media sites such as Twitter have emerged aspowerful, real-time means of information sharing on the Web. These short messages tend to reflect a variety of events in real time, making Twitter particularly well suited as a source of real-time event content. In this paper, we explore approaches for analyzing the stream of Twitter messages to distinguish between messages about real-world events andnon-event messages. Our approach relies on a rich family of aggregatestatistics of topically similar message clusters. Large-scale experiments over millions of Twitter messages show the effectiveness of our approach for surfacing real-world event content on Twitter. Twitter has become one of the largest platforms for users around the world to share anything happening around them with friends and beyond. A bursty topic in Twitter is one that triggers a surge of relevant tweets within a short time, which often reflects important events of mass interest. How to leverage Twitter for early detection of bursty topics has therefore become an important research problem with immense practical value. Despite the wealth of research work on topic modeling and analysis in Twitter, it remains a huge challenge to detect bursty topics in real-time. As existing methods can hardly scale to handle the task with the tweet stream in real-time, we propose in this paper Topic Sketch, a novel sketch-based topic model together with a set of techniques to achieve real-time detection. We evaluate our solution on a tweet stream with over 30 million tweets. Our experiment results show both efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Especially it is also demonstrated that Topic Sketch can potentially handle hundreds of millions tweets per day which is close to the total number of daily tweets in Twitter and present bursty event in finer-granularity.