Abstract
Retweets are an important mechanism for recognising propagation of information on the Twitter social media platform. However, many retweets do not use the official retweet mechanism, or even community established conventions, and these “dark retweets” are not accounted for in many existing analysis. In this paper, a comprehensive matrix of tweet propagation is presented to show the different nuances of retweeting, based on seven characteristics: whether it is proprietary, the mechanism used, whether it is directed to followers or non-followers, whether it mentions other users, if it is explicitly propagating another tweet, if it links to an original tweet, and what is the audience it is pushed to. Based on this matrix and two assumptions of retweetability, the degrees of a retweet’s “darkness” can be determined. This matrix was evaluated over 2.3 million tweets and it was found that dark retweets amounted to 12.86% (for search results less than 1500 tweets per URL) and 24.7% (for search results including more than 1500 tweets per URL) respectively. By extrapolating these results with those found in existing studies, potentially thousands of retweets may be hidden from existing studies on retweets.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Boyd, D., Golder, S., Lotan, G.: Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. In: Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 1–10. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2010)
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gunmadi, K.P.: Measuring user influence in Twitter: The million follower fallacy. In: International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. AAAI (2010)
Mustafaraj, E., Metaxas, P.: From obscurity to prominence in minutes: Political speech and real-time search. In: Proceedings of the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC: US (2010)
Adar, E., Zhang, L., Adamic, L.A., Lukose, R.M.: Implicit structure and the dynamics of blogspace. In: Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem, WWW 2004, New York, NY (2004)
Matsumura, N., Yamamoto, H., Tomozawa, D.: Finding influencers and consumer insights in the blogosphere. In: International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. AAAI (2010)
Galuba, W., Aberer, K., Chakraborty, D., Despotovic, Z., Kellerer, W.: Outtweeting the twitterers- predicting information cascades in microblogs. In: 3rd Workshop on Online Social Networks, Boston, MA, USA. USENIX (2010)
Wu, S., Hofman, J.M., Mason, W.A., Watts, D.J.: Who says what to whom on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2011). ACM (2011)
Bakshy, E., Hofman, J.M., Mason, W.A., Watts, D.J.: Identifying ‘influencers’ on Twitter. In: Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. ACM (2011)
Nagarajan, M., Purohit, H., Sheth, A.: A qualitative examination of topical tweet and retweet practices. In: International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. AAAI (2010)
Suh, B., Hong, L., Pirolli, P., Chi, E.H.: Want to be retweeted? Large scale analytics on factors impacting retweet in Twitter network. In: IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing, pp. 177–184. IEEE (2010)
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., Moon, S.: What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, pp. 591–600. ACM (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Azman, N., Millard, D.E., Weal, M.J. (2012). Dark Retweets: Investigating Non-conventional Retweeting Patterns. In: Aberer, K., Flache, A., Jager, W., Liu, L., Tang, J., Guéret, C. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7710. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35386-4_36
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35385-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35386-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)