Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? Weak Ties, Social Media, and Flash Movements
Abstract
Major Goals: The major goal of the project focused on understanding how to use social media (and, especially, Twitter) to understand mass-- especially political and social information. Accomplishments: This project provided the support for a series of papers examining online collective behavior. This grant has yielded an impressive corpus of computational social science papers that have already been cited many thousands of times. For example: We identified flaws in "Google flu trends" in a paper in Science, which has become required reading on the issues in the use of "big data." We developed a method to link administrative data to twitter handles to produce valid estimates of the prevalence of "fake news" on Twitter. (These methods and the resulting data have resulted in an additional stream of papers post grant.) We developed methods to study the dynamics of collective human attention, and to identify from contextual traces linkages among political actors and to detect political "spin" in textual content.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 13, 2017
- Accession Number
- AD1228616
Entities
People
- Alan E. Mislove
- David Lazer
Organizations
- Northeastern University