Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media
Ankita Bhaumik Ning Sa Gregorios Katsios Tomek Strzalkowski
Social media platforms are popular tools for disseminating targeted
information during major public events like elections or pandemics. Systematic
analysis of the message traffic can provide valuable insights into prevailing
opinions and social dynamics among different segments of the population. We are
specifically interested in influence spread, and in particular whether more
deliberate influence operations can be detected. However, filtering out the
essential messages with telltale influence indicators from the extensive and
often chaotic social media traffic is a major challenge. In this paper we
present a novel approach to extract influence indicators from messages
circulating among groups of users discussing particular topics. We build upon
the concept of a convo to identify influential authors who are actively
promoting some particular agenda around that topic within the group. We focus
on two influence indicators: the (control of) agenda and the use of emotional
language.