How Web Communities Influence Each Other Savvas Zannettou PhD - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

How Web Communities Influence Each Other Savvas Zannettou PhD Student at Cyprus University of Technology (cuckademic in the making)

Motivation • Information on the web jumps from one web community to another • Forming a centipede of web communities • How to measure web communities’ influence to each other ?

4chan basics • Anonymous conversations grouped into threads • Original Poster (OP) creates a new thread by making a post with an image • Other users can reply with or without images, and possible add references to previous posts • No likes, share, favorites, etc.

Why do we care about 4chan?

Reddit Basics • Popular news aggregator • The so-called “front page of the internet” • A user can start a new thread by creating a submission with a URL • Other users reply in a structured way with or without URLs • Users can upvote/downvotesubmissions and replies • Thousands of user-created sub-communities • Focus on news, conspiracy, worldnews, politics, The_Donald, and AskRedditsubreddits

Why do we care about Reddit?

Twitter Basics • Mainstream Online Social Network • Content is grouped using hashtags (#) • A user can send a tweet that consists of 140 characters • Reaches all of the users’ followers • Users can retweet, like and reply on a tweet

Research Question • How do these communities influence each other? • Not a straightforward task • We look on mainstream and alternative news in the form of URLs

Datasets • Compiled a list of 99 mainstream and alternative news sources

Influence Estimation • Hawkes Processes 2 5.3 A 1 4 B 3 5.1 5.2 C • Measured the influence of /pol/ board, Twitter and 6 subreddits

Results • Twitter top influencers for alternative URLs • The_Donald(2.72%) • /pol/ (1.96%) • Politics (1.1%) • Twitter top influencers for mainstream URLs • Politics (4.29%) • /pol/ (3.01%) • The_Donald(2.97%)

Open Research Directions • Measuring the influence between web communities, when taking into account all available modalities of information • How to correlate information from multiple modalities? • How does information mutate when jumping from a Web community to another? • What are other communication channels used? • e.g., Discord

Responsible “jews”