How Web Communities Influence Each Other Savvas Zannettou PhD - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Mar 25, 2023 150 likes •358 views

How Web Communities Influence Each Other Savvas Zannettou PhD Student at Cyprus University of Technology (cuckademic in the making) Motivation Information on the web jumps from one web community to another Forming a centipede of web

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How Web Communities Influence Each Other

Savvas Zannettou PhD Student at Cyprus University of Technology (cuckademic in the making)

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Motivation

Information on the web jumps from one web community to another
Forming a centipede of web communities
How to measure web communities’ influence to each other ?

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4chan basics

Anonymous conversations grouped into

threads

Original Poster (OP) creates a new thread by

making a post with an image

Other users can reply with or without images,

and possible add references to previous posts

No likes, share, favorites, etc.

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Why do we care about 4chan?

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Reddit Basics

Popular news aggregator
The so-called “front page of the internet”
A user can start a new thread by creating a

submission with a URL

Other users reply in a structured way with or without URLs
Users can upvote/downvotesubmissions and replies
Thousands of user-created sub-communities
Focus on news, conspiracy, worldnews, politics,

The_Donald, and AskRedditsubreddits

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Why do we care about Reddit?

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Twitter Basics

Mainstream Online Social Network
Content is grouped using hashtags (#)
A user can send a tweet that consists
f 140 characters
Reaches all of the users’ followers
Users can retweet, like and reply on a

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Research Question

How do these communities influence each other?
Not a straightforward task
We look on mainstream and alternative news in the form of URLs

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Datasets

Compiled a list of 99 mainstream and alternative news sources

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Influence Estimation

Hawkes Processes
Measured the influence of /pol/ board, Twitter and 6 subreddits

A B C

1 2 3 4 5.1 5.2 5.3

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Results

Twitter top influencers for

alternative URLs

The_Donald(2.72%)
/pol/ (1.96%)
Politics (1.1%)
Twitter top influencers for

mainstream URLs

Politics (4.29%)
/pol/ (3.01%)
The_Donald(2.97%)

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Open Research Directions

Measuring the influence between web communities, when taking

into account all available modalities of information

How to correlate information from multiple modalities?
How does information mutate when jumping from a Web community

to another?

What are other communication channels used?
e.g., Discord

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