Facebook feelings are contagious: Study examines how emotions spread online
You can’t catch a cold from a friend online. But can you catch a mood? It would seem so, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego. Published in PLOS ONE, the study analyzes over a billion anonymized status updates among more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States. Positive posts beget positive posts, the study finds, and negative posts beget negative ones, with the positive posts being more influential, or more contagious. “Our study suggests that people are not just choosing other people like themselves to associate with but actually causing their friends’ emotional expressions to change,” said lead author James Fowler, professor of political science in the Division of Social Sciences and of medical genetics in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. There is abundant scientific literature on how emotion can spread among people – through direct contact, in person – not only among friends but also among strangers or near-strangers.
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Twitter’s Video App, Vine, Adds Private Messages
Twitter’s Vine video-sharing service released a new feature that allows you to send video and text messages to other people on Vine. Previously, the only option was for sharing Vine’s six-second videos with the public. The new option underscores the push by social companies to emphasize more personal, one-to-one or one-to-few forms of communication, in response to the rising popularity of apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp. Facebook’s Instagram Direct launched in December. Vine’s push into direct messaging might see greater pickup, as the app enables you to send videos to anyone in your address book, even if they aren’t on Vine. With the addition of Vine messaging, now Facebook and Twitter both have multiple direct-messaging channels.
Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution
This paper describes the deployment of a large-scale study designed to measure human interactions across a variety of communication channels, with high temporal resolution and spanning multiple years—the Copenhagen Networks Study. Specifically, we collect data on face-to-face interactions, telecommunication, social networks, location, and background information (personality, demographics, health, politics) for a densely connected population of 1 000 individuals, using state-of-the-art smartphones as social sensors. Here we provide an overview of the related work and describe the motivation and research agenda driving the study. Additionally, the paper details the data-types measured, and the technical infrastructure in terms of both backend and phone software, as well as an outline of the deployment procedures. Figures Citation: Stopczynski A, Sekara V, Sapiezynski P, Cuttone A, Madsen MM, et al. (2014) Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution. Introduction Related Work
Social Network Analysis Reveals Full Scale of Kremlin’s Twitter Bot Campaign
Profile pictures from a large network of pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts. Image by Lawrence Alexander. With the aid of open-source tools, Internet researcher Lawrence Alexander gathered and visualised data on nearly 20,500 pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts, revealing the massive scale of information manipulation attempts on the RuNet. In what is the first part of a two-part analysis, he explains how he did it and what he found. RuNet Echo has previously written about the efforts of the Russian “Troll Army” to inject the social networks and online media websites with pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Twitter is no exception, and multiple users have observed Twitter accounts tweeting similar statements during and around key breaking news and events. But the evidence in this two-part analysis points to their role in an extensive program of disinformation. Using the open-source NodeXL tool, I collected and imported a complete list of accounts tweeting that exact phrase into a spreadsheet.
TWITTER ANALYTICS 101 – GETTING STARTED
While browsing in my Feedly account, my eye fell upon an article about Twitter analytics on Friday. The article, ‘Revealing the World of Twitter Analytics’,by Social Media Today instantly caught my eye! Love me some analytics, yet this, Twitter analytics, was news to me! The article started out by explaining where (i.e. under your Twitter Ads campaign) in your Twitter account you could find your analytics (they showed a screen shot) and then went on to show & tell (with more screenshots) their account’s Twitter analytics. All this was based upon the assumptionthat you would have ‘Twitter Ads’ and therefore ‘Analytics’ as an option on your account. This is what I reread – first lines in the article about Twitter Analytics - “Before I start writing on Twitter Analytics, I would like to bust a myth – “Twitter analytics is only available for accounts that have advertised on Twitter.That statement is not true. Was I going to have to wait for it to roll out? Challenge? I saw this:
The Emerging Science of Superspreaders (And How to Tell If You're One Of Them)
Who are the most influential spreaders of information on a network? That’s a question that marketers, bloggers, news services and even governments would like answered. Not least because the answer could provide ways to promote products quickly, to boost the popularity of political parties above their rivals and to seed the rapid spread of news and opinions. So it’s not surprising that network theorists have spent some time thinking about how best to identify these people and to check how the information they receive might spread around a network. But there’s a problem. But there is growing evidence that information does not spread through real networks in the same way as it does through these idealised ones. So the question of how to find the superspreaders remains open. In the past, network scientists have developed a number of mathematical tests to measure the influence that individuals have on the spread of information through a network.
Cryptome
Twitter Redesign: Hello, Facebook
Twitter's newest profile revamp prompts comparisons to Facebook, but the changes make it more usable. Here's what to expect. Twitter users: Your profile just got a heavy dose of Facebook. Beginning Tuesday, Twitter will begin migrating users to a new profile design that it tested back in February. Along with the new design, Twitter will launch three new ways for you and others to interact with tweets. [Facebook has suffered some strikeouts during its 10 years. Two other additions include pinned tweets, which let you choose one of your posts to tack to the top of your page, and filtered tweets, which let you choose which timeline to view when looking at other profiles. While some users may lament a more Facebook-like design, the changes do improve the desktop version of Twitter. While Twitter green-lit many features from its February test, some didn't make the cut. Twitter will gradually roll out the new design to users beginning Tuesday. More Insights
