Understanding human reposting patterns on Sina Weibo from a global perspective

Weiyi Yao, Pengfei Jiao, Wenjun Wang and Yueheng Sun

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 518, issue C, 374-383

Abstract: Quantitative analysis of human reposting patterns on social networking sites will provide helpful insights into the tracking and management of information spreading and social contagion. A large amount of efforts have been made on mining and explaining the patterns recently. However, existing researches mainly focused on specific events, topics or individuals. A more macroscopic angle is required for understanding the reposting characteristics on SNSs. In this paper, we explore the human reposting patterns from a global perspective by analyzing the large-scale reposting networks, which are constructed by about 1.5 billion reposting records collected from Sina Weibo over 15 months. Experiments indicate that the times of being reposted obey power law decays, and the frequency of reposting between two users follows a distribution of exponentially truncated power law. Meanwhile, taking user categories and micro-blog contents into account, we classify users into three categories and find that different users have distinct habits when reposting micro-blogs, e.g. common individuals would like to repost micro-blogs about entertainments, good qualities and sharing life styles.

Keywords: Human dynamics; Reposting networks; Global analysis; Sina Weibo (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437118314754
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:518:y:2019:i:c:p:374-383

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2018.11.043

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().