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

Hassan Aldarbesti, Huijing Deng, Juliana Sutanto, Chee Wei

Source Title: Journal of Global Information Management (JGIM)28(2)

ISSN: 1062-7375|EISSN: 1533-7995|EISBN13: 9781799804116|DOI: 10.4018/JGIM.2020040110

MLA

Aldarbesti, Hassan, et al. "Who Are More Active and Influential on Twitter?: An Investigation of the Ukraine's Conflict Episode." JGIM vol.28, no.2 2020: pp.225-246. http://doi.org/10.4018/JGIM.2020040110

APA

Aldarbesti, H., Deng, H., Sutanto, J., & Wei, C. (2020). Who Are More Active and Influential on Twitter?: An Investigation of the Ukraine's Conflict Episode. Journal of Global Information Management (JGIM), 28(2), 225-246. http://doi.org/10.4018/JGIM.2020040110

Chicago

Aldarbesti, Hassan, et al. "Who Are More Active and Influential on Twitter?: An Investigation of the Ukraine's Conflict Episode," Journal of Global Information Management (JGIM) 28, no.2: 225-246. http://doi.org/10.4018/JGIM.2020040110

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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.