How Twitter Shapes Public Opinion
Tuesday, March 11, 2014 - 10:31
in Mathematics & Economics
How exactly does Twitter, with its 241 million users tweeting out 500 million messages daily, shape public opinion? That question was tackled by a group of researchers in China, who investigated how opinions evolve on Twitter by gathering about 6 million messages (tweeted over a six month period), which they ran through algorithms and analyzed. Described in the journal Chaos, the work reveals several surprises about how Twitter shapes public opinion, researchers say.