Who Are More Active and Influential on Twitter? : An Investigation of the Ukraine’s Conflict Episode

Aldarbesti, Hassan and Deng, Huijing and Sutanto, Juliana and Phang, Chee Wei (2020) Who Are More Active and Influential on Twitter? : An Investigation of the Ukraine’s Conflict Episode. Journal of Global Information Management, 28 (2). pp. 225-246.

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Abstract

Twitter is an emerging form of news media with a wide spectrum of participants involving in news dissemination. Owing to their open and interactive nature, individuals, non-media, and non-commercial participants may play a greater role on this platform; thus, it is deemed to disrupt conventional media structures and introduce new ways of information flow. While this may be true in certain aspects in news dissemination such as allowing a broader range of participants, the authors' analysis of the involvement and influence of the different participant types, based on a large tweets dataset collected during the Ukraine's conflict event (2013-2014), portrays a different picture. Specifically, the results unveil that while non-commercial participants were the most “involved” in generating tweets about the news event, the retweets they attracted, a common measure of influence, were among the lowest. In contrast, mass media and sources related to journalists, professional associations and commercial organizations garnered the highest retweets.