TY - GEN

T1 - Influencers on the Russian Twitter

T2 - 3rd International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia, EGOSE 2016

AU - Bodrunova, Svetlana S.

AU - Litvinenko, Anna A.

AU - Blekanov, Ivan S.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2016 ACM.

PY - 2016/11/22

Y1 - 2016/11/22

N2 - With the emergence of discussion platforms like Twitter, the hopes rose that computer-mediated public sphere would become more even in access to discussion than mass-mediatized public sphere of the late 20th century. Scholars have argued that it will eventually form an 'opinion crossroads' where conflicts would be discussed by all the parties involved. But today, existing research provides mixed evidence on whether ordinary users, rather than mainstream media and institutional actors, can become influencers in discussions on current issues, e.g. relations between host and migrant communities. We focus on the Twitter discussion about an inter-ethnic conflict in Moscow's Biryuliovo district in 2013 and aim at defining who were its real influencers by reconstructing the discussion's web graph, as well as analyzing and juxtaposing its metrics to figures indicating user activity. Our results show that, despite hyperactivity of media accounts, they were largely absent as deliberative influencers, but the place of influencers was occupied by politicized (nationalist and liberal) accounts, rather by eyewitness reporters or public figures.

AB - With the emergence of discussion platforms like Twitter, the hopes rose that computer-mediated public sphere would become more even in access to discussion than mass-mediatized public sphere of the late 20th century. Scholars have argued that it will eventually form an 'opinion crossroads' where conflicts would be discussed by all the parties involved. But today, existing research provides mixed evidence on whether ordinary users, rather than mainstream media and institutional actors, can become influencers in discussions on current issues, e.g. relations between host and migrant communities. We focus on the Twitter discussion about an inter-ethnic conflict in Moscow's Biryuliovo district in 2013 and aim at defining who were its real influencers by reconstructing the discussion's web graph, as well as analyzing and juxtaposing its metrics to figures indicating user activity. Our results show that, despite hyperactivity of media accounts, they were largely absent as deliberative influencers, but the place of influencers was occupied by politicized (nationalist and liberal) accounts, rather by eyewitness reporters or public figures.

KW - Influencer

KW - Inter-ethnic conflict

KW - Twitter

KW - Web graph

KW - Webcrawling

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85008177608&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3014087.3014106

DO - 10.1145/3014087.3014106

M3 - Conference contribution

T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

SP - 212

EP - 222

BT - EGOSE 2016 - International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

Y2 - 21 November 2016 through 22 November 2016

ER -