Abstract
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental
arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it
be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral
marketing. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet
and we are interested in which dimensions of the content of a tweet leads to
retweeting. We hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be
retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To
test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets
about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text
corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can
distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present
evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not
in the non-news segment. Our findings may be summarized ’If you want to be
cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public’.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Future Information Technology : 6th International Conference, FutureTech 2011 - Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011 - Proceedings, Part II |
Publisher | Springer |
Publication date | 2011 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-3-642-22308-2 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-642-22309-9 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2011 |
Event | FTRA International Conference on Future Information Technology - Loutraki, Greece Duration: 1 Jan 2011 → … Conference number: 6 |
Conference
Conference | FTRA International Conference on Future Information Technology |
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Number | 6 |
City | Loutraki, Greece |
Period | 01/01/2011 → … |
Series | Communications in Computer and Information Science |
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Number | 185 |
ISSN | 1865-0929 |