What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?
Twitter, once considered strictly a social network site, is now some people’s main news source. Twitter allows information to spread across a nation, and reading a tweet to learn about current events is more convenient and faster than turning on the news or opening up a newspaper. So how is this information spreading so rapidly? The famous “retweet”. By retweeting someone else’s tweet, information begins to spread beyond the initial tweeter’s followers. According to this journal article, “…any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1, 000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet.” This shows why Twitter is such an effective site in spreading news media.
There are many topics covered in class that relate to this journal article, including, power laws and diffusion. The way news spreads around the world, for example, through retweets, is an example of network diffusion. After the first retweet, the information will spread further than just adjacent nodes, and it will spread rather quickly. For the most part, the plot of number of tweets vs. number of followings represents a power law with an exponent of 2.276. It is only at extreme cases (high number of followings and high number of tweets) that this power law fails. This is consistent with the fact that most social networks have a power law with an exponent between 2 and 3. This power law shows the distribution of the Twitter social network.
Next time you want some quick news updates, turn to Twitter, not your usual news channel or newspaper. Network diffusion will surely not fail you.
https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~snean151/wiki.files/22-WhatisTwitterASocialNetworkOrANewsMedia.pdf