The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation within Twitter reveals that the majority of users act as passive information consumers and do not forward the content to the network. Therefore, in order for individuals to become influential they must not only obtain attention and thus be popular, but also overcome user passivity. We propose an algorithm that determines the influence and passivity of users based on their information forwarding activity. An evaluation performed with a 2.5 million user dataset shows that our influence measure is a good predictor of URL clicks, outperforming several other measures that do not explicitly take user passivity into account. We also explicitly demonstrate that high popularity does not necessarily imply high influence and vice-versa.
And since the majority of users act as passive information consumers and do not forward the content to the network, Romero et al. REF developed an efficient algorithm to quantify the influence of all the users in Twitter by taking passivity into account, and they used the global clicks of shorts URLs as the standard of the influence, which is noise as they said.
Influence and Passivity in Social Media
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science Physics