Influence of Internal and External Sources on Information Diffusion at Twitter

Abstract

Twitter is widely used by the social media users to share their thoughts, experiences and breaking news. Due to huge user base and quick delivery of information, posts of Twitter users reach millions of people within few seconds. During extreme events and social crisis, emergency responders utilize local information posted by the Twitter users to combat the chaotic situation. Even news media cite Twitter as their source of information a number of times. With these applications, it is necessary to understand how information reaches individuals at Twitter network. There are mainly two ways by which Twitter users receive an information: (i) through internal links within Twitter network, and (ii) through sources out of Twitter network that are newspapers, radio and televisions. Existing research mainly utilized internal links for modeling information diffusion at Twitter and very few studies considered external influence. There is a study which quantifies the effects of internal and external sources on the mentions of URLs in users’ tweets. In this paper, authors have utilized retweets, URLs and hashtags to quantify internal and external influence on information diffusion at Twitter. The analysis of 880 K tweets clearly represents that the diffusion of 79% tweets is internally influenced and only remaining 21% can be attributed to the influence of external sources.