Start Date
11-12-2016 12:00 AM
Description
Online socializing technologies have given rise to new social behaviors. We focus on the effect of reiteration tool (tools that enable us to redistribute a copy of content that others have posted) on users’ online persona building. Specifically, we study retweeting behavior on Twitter and ask: (1) Do users expand the breadth of topics they discuss? (2) Do users change the distribution of the topics they discuss? (3) Does the behaviors of experts differ from those of non-experts? We use data about 2,435 non-expert users, and 415 expert users and the users whom they follow and use LDA topic modeling to derive the topics in both self-tweets and re-tweets. We find that users rarely add new topics when retweeting and they do not alter significantly the distribution of topics. Also, this tendency is stronger among expert users, indicating that they rely more on their own words for impression management.
Recommended Citation
Geva, Hilah; Oestreicher-Singer, Gal; and Saar-Tsechansky, Maytal, "Using Retweets to Shape our Online Persona: a Topic Modeling Approach" (2016). ICIS 2016 Proceedings. 1.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/Economics/Presentations/1
Using Retweets to Shape our Online Persona: a Topic Modeling Approach
Online socializing technologies have given rise to new social behaviors. We focus on the effect of reiteration tool (tools that enable us to redistribute a copy of content that others have posted) on users’ online persona building. Specifically, we study retweeting behavior on Twitter and ask: (1) Do users expand the breadth of topics they discuss? (2) Do users change the distribution of the topics they discuss? (3) Does the behaviors of experts differ from those of non-experts? We use data about 2,435 non-expert users, and 415 expert users and the users whom they follow and use LDA topic modeling to derive the topics in both self-tweets and re-tweets. We find that users rarely add new topics when retweeting and they do not alter significantly the distribution of topics. Also, this tendency is stronger among expert users, indicating that they rely more on their own words for impression management.