TY - GEN

T1 - Comparing influencers

T2 - 9th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2017

AU - Bodrunova, Svetlana S.

AU - Litvinenko, Anna A.

AU - Blekanov, Ivan S.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.

PY - 2017

Y1 - 2017

N2 - Today, a range of research approaches is used to define the so-called influencers in discussions in social media, and one can trace both conceptual and methodological differences in how influencers are defined and tracked. We distinguish between ‘marketing’ and ‘deliberative’ conceptualization of influencers and between metrics based on absolute figures and those from social network analytics; combining them leads to better understanding of user activity and connectivity measures in defining influential users. We add to the existing research by asking whether user activity necessarily leads to better connectivity and by what metrics in online ad hoc discussions, and try to compare the structure of influencers. To do this, we use comparable outbursts of discussions on inter-ethnic conflicts related to immigration. We collect Twitter data on violent conflicts between host and re-settled groups in Russia and Germany and look at top20 user lists by eight parameters of activity and connectivity to assess the structure of influencers in terms of pro/contra-migrant cleavages and institutional belonging. Our results show that, in both discussions, the number of users involved matters most for becoming an influencer by betweenness and pagerank centralities. Also, contrary to expectations, Russian top users all in all are, in general, more neutral, while Germans are more divided, but in both countries pro-migrant media oppose anti-migrant informal leaders.

AB - Today, a range of research approaches is used to define the so-called influencers in discussions in social media, and one can trace both conceptual and methodological differences in how influencers are defined and tracked. We distinguish between ‘marketing’ and ‘deliberative’ conceptualization of influencers and between metrics based on absolute figures and those from social network analytics; combining them leads to better understanding of user activity and connectivity measures in defining influential users. We add to the existing research by asking whether user activity necessarily leads to better connectivity and by what metrics in online ad hoc discussions, and try to compare the structure of influencers. To do this, we use comparable outbursts of discussions on inter-ethnic conflicts related to immigration. We collect Twitter data on violent conflicts between host and re-settled groups in Russia and Germany and look at top20 user lists by eight parameters of activity and connectivity to assess the structure of influencers in terms of pro/contra-migrant cleavages and institutional belonging. Our results show that, in both discussions, the number of users involved matters most for becoming an influencer by betweenness and pagerank centralities. Also, contrary to expectations, Russian top users all in all are, in general, more neutral, while Germans are more divided, but in both countries pro-migrant media oppose anti-migrant informal leaders.

KW - Germany

KW - Influencers

KW - Inter-ethnic conflict

KW - Russia

KW - Twitter

KW - Web crawling

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029543458&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_22

DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_22

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85029543458

SN - 9783319672168

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 360

EP - 376

BT - Social Informatics - 9th International Conference, SocInfo 2017, Proceedings

A2 - Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca

A2 - Yasseri, Taha

A2 - Mashhadi, Afra

PB - Springer Nature

Y2 - 13 September 2017 through 15 September 2017

ER -