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Emotion Dynamics of Public Opinions on Twitter

Published: 04 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Recently, social media has been considered the fastest medium for information broadcasting and sharing. Considering the wide range of applications such as viral marketing, political campaigns, social advertisement, and so on, influencing characteristics of users or tweets have attracted several researchers. It is observed from various studies that influential messages or users create a high impact on a social ecosystem. In this study, we assume that public opinion on a social issue on Twitter carries a certain degree of emotion, and there is an emotion flow underneath the Twitter network. In this article, we investigate social dynamics of emotion present in users’ opinions and attempt to understand (i) changing characteristics of users’ emotions toward a social issue over time, (ii) influence of public emotions on individuals’ emotions, (iii) cause of changing opinion by social factors, and so on. We study users’ emotion dynamics over a collection of 17.65M tweets with 69.36K users and observe 63% of the users are likely to change their emotional state against the topic into their subsequent tweets. Tweets were coming from the member community shows higher influencing capability than the other community sources. It is also observed that retweets influence users more than hashtags, mentions, and replies.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 38, Issue 2
April 2020
266 pages
ISSN:1046-8188
EISSN:1558-2868
DOI:10.1145/3379433
Issue’s Table of Contents
© 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 04 March 2020
Accepted: 01 January 2020
Revised: 01 November 2019
Received: 01 June 2019
Published in TOIS Volume 38, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Emotion transition
  2. influence measure
  3. opinion discussion
  4. social agreement
  5. social dynamics

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  • Ministry of Information and Electronic Technology, Government of India

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