Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

Lars Kai Hansen; Adam Arvidsson; Finn Årup Nielsen; Elanor Colleoni; Michael Etter

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9

Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

Lars Kai Hansen, Adam Arvidsson, Finn Årup Nielsen, Elanor Colleoni, Michael Etter

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review

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
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	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9
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
Number	6
City	Loutraki, Greece
Period	01/01/2011 → …

Series	Communications in Computer and Information Science
Number	185
ISSN	1865-0929

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Hansen, L. K., Arvidsson, A., Nielsen, F. Å., Colleoni, E., & Etter, M. (2011). Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter. In Future Information Technology: 6th International Conference, FutureTech 2011 - Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011 - Proceedings, Part II Springer. Communications in Computer and Information Science, No. 185 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9

Hansen, Lars Kai ; Arvidsson, Adam ; Nielsen, Finn Årup ; Colleoni, Elanor ; Etter, Michael. / Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter. Future Information Technology: 6th International Conference, FutureTech 2011 - Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011 - Proceedings, Part II. Springer, 2011. (Communications in Computer and Information Science; No. 185).

@inproceedings{38a0c4bd40cb46f38ba9aad8f28ece2a,

title = "Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter",

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 {\textquoteright}If you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public{\textquoteright}.",

author = "Hansen, {Lars Kai} and Adam Arvidsson and Nielsen, {Finn {\AA}rup} and Elanor Colleoni and Michael Etter",

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language = "English",

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Hansen, LK, Arvidsson, A, Nielsen, FÅ, Colleoni, E & Etter, M 2011, Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter. in Future Information Technology: 6th International Conference, FutureTech 2011 - Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011 - Proceedings, Part II. Springer, Communications in Computer and Information Science, no. 185, FTRA International Conference on Future Information Technology, Loutraki, Greece, 01/01/2011. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9

Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter. / Hansen, Lars Kai; Arvidsson, Adam; Nielsen, Finn Årup; Colleoni, Elanor; Etter, Michael.

Future Information Technology: 6th International Conference, FutureTech 2011 - Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011 - Proceedings, Part II. Springer, 2011. (Communications in Computer and Information Science; No. 185).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review

TY - GEN

T1 - Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

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AU - Nielsen, Finn Årup

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AU - Etter, Michael

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AB - 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’.

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DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9

M3 - Article in proceedings

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Hansen LK, Arvidsson A, Nielsen FÅ, Colleoni E, Etter M. Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter. In Future Information Technology: 6th International Conference, FutureTech 2011 - Loutraki, Greece, June 28-30, 2011 - Proceedings, Part II. Springer. 2011. (Communications in Computer and Information Science; No. 185). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9