How Twitter shapes public opinion

Dominant, majority viewpoints emerge quickly on Twitter and, once stabilized, become difficult to change -- according to new study in the journal CHAOS

2014-03-11

(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON D.C., March 11, 2014 -- 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 140-character-or-less messages that were tweeted out over a six month period in the first half of 2011. They ran these messages through computer algorithms that sorted them by topic ("iPhone 4" or "blackberry," for instance), and they analyzed the underlying sentiments of the authors as they evolved over time.

Described in the journal Chaos, produced by AIP Publishing, the work reveals several surprises about how Twitter shapes public opinion, said Fei Xiong, a lecturer at Beijing Jiaotong University who gathered and analyzed the data with Professor Yun Liu. The new revelations may shape how political candidates run their social media campaigns or influence the way companies market their goods and services.

What the Study Found

Xiong and Liu discovered that public opinion on Twitter often evolves rapidly and levels off quickly into an ordered state in which one opinion remains dominant. In true social media form, this consensus is often driven by the endorsements of larger and larger groups, which tend to have the most influence.

The work also revealed that when dominant opinions emerge, however, they tend not to achieve complete consensus. In fact, Xiong said, when Twitter users who hold minority views are faced with overwhelming opposition, they are still not likely to change their opinions.

Since public opinion levels off and evolves into an ordered state within a short time, small advantages of one opinion in the early stages can turn into a bigger advantage during the evolution of public opinion, Xiong said.

"Once public opinion stabilizes, it's difficult to change," he added.

The work also revealed that Twitter users overall are more likely to work to change the opinions of others than to admit to changes of their own.

How the Data Was Collected

The researchers downloaded tweets for this study using Twitter's open API [application programming interface] to get a random sampling of all data, which was then narrowed based on topic.

While this particular study was done more than two years ago, and there are more Twitter users now, the researchers believe that the results would still be similar if done on a new dataset today, though Xiong and Liu said the analysis might be improved by integrating new algorithms that analyze the sentiment of the messages.

Xiong envisions that political candidates and large companies may benefit from applying this work toward developing "network applications" that would move beyond simply collecting and analyzing users' opinions and allow them to develop and test hypotheses about what really works.

"By focusing on a network application, candidates or companies can analyze the characteristics and behavior patterns of their supporters and protesters to explore whether the measures they take can influence public opinion and which opinion may succeed," Xiong said.

INFORMATION: The article, "Opinion Formation on Social Media: An Empirical Approach" by Fei Xiong and Yun Liu in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (DOI: 10.1063/1.4866011). It will be published online on March 11, 2014. After that date, it may be accessed at: http://tinyurl.com/ptbq7m4

ABOUT THE JOURNAL Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science is devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena and describing the manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines. See: http://chaos.aip.org/

[Attachments] See images for this press release:

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Soil microbes shift as shrubs invade remnant hill prairies

2014-03-11

URBANA, Ill. – Perched high on the bluffs of the big river valleys in the Midwest are some of the last remnants of never-farmed prairie grasslands. These patches, edged by forest, are slowly being taken over by shrubs. A recent University of Illinois study examined the soil microbes on nine patches, also called "balds," that had varying degrees of shrub invasion and found an interesting shift in the composition of the microbial community. "When we looked at the soil samples from a lightly encroached hill prairie remnant, it was very clear that there was a set of fungi ...

Tracking neighborhood eating habits to promote healthier diets

2014-03-11

Poor food choices, such as overconsumption of carbonated soft drinks, are an important factor driving the global obesity epidemic and have been linked directly to diabetes and heart disease. While public health agencies are working to help people to make healthier choices, monitoring the effectiveness of these efforts has been costly and difficult. But now, using the same digital data employed by marketers to promote food products, McGill University's David Buckeridge has developed a way for health agencies to track Montreal consumers' food choices, neighborhood by neighborhood. ...

NASA saw some power in Tropical Cyclone Gillian before making landfall

2014-03-11

VIDEO: The TRMM Satellite's Precipitation Radar data was used to create this 3-D flyby over Tropical Cyclone Gillian on March 10. Some powerful storms within Gillian reached heights above 16 km/~9.9... Click here for more information. NASA's TRMM satellite saw some towering thunderstorms in Tropical Cyclone Gillian before it made landfall over the Western Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia. Gillian has been staying over land since, and is now a remnant low pressure area. ...

Higher levels of CSF alpha-synuclein predict faster cognitive loss in Parkinson disease

2014-03-11

Philadelphia, PA, March 11, 2014 – The course of Parkinson disease (PD) can vary from gradual deterioration to precipitous decline in motor or cognitive function. Therefore identifying predictors of progression can benefit understanding of PD disease progression and impact management. Data from 304 PD patients followed for up to 8 years indicate that patients with higher cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) alpha-synuclein levels experienced faster cognitive decline in the following months, although no associations were found between alpha-synuclein levels and motor changes. The results ...

Cellular alchemy: Penn study shows how to make insulin-producing cells from gut cells

2014-03-11

PHILADELPHIA — Destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas is at the heart of type 1 and type 2 diabetes. "We are looking for ways to make new beta cells for these patients to one day replace daily insulin injections," says Ben Stanger, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Transplanting islet cells to restore normal blood sugar levels in patients with severe type 1 diabetes is one approach to treating the disease, and using stem cells to create beta cells ...

Gesturing with hands is a powerful tool for children's math learning

2014-03-11

Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to new research from University of Chicago's Department of Psychology. Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn. This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action. "We found that acting gave children a relatively shallow understanding of a novel math concept, ...

Education boosts brain function long after school

2014-03-11

European populations are growing older on average, a trend that could pose serious challenges to health care, budgets, and economic growth. As a greater proportion of a country's population grows into old age, average cognition levels and national productivity tend to decline, and the incidence of dementia increases. "Finding ways to improve the cognition of seniors is of central importance to the economic well-being of aging countries," says IIASA researcher Vegard Skirbekk, who worked on the study with researchers Nicole Schneeweis and Rudolf Winter Ebmer at Linz University The ...

Researchers closer to improving safety, effectiveness of lithium therapy

2014-03-11

Tampa, FL (March 11, 2014) – Lithium, one of the oldest and most widely used drugs to treat neuropsychiatric illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, has a serious drawback – toxicity. In a continued effort to find a safer form of lithium, researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) have discovered that lithium salicylate, an alternative salt form, might be the answer. The researchers found that oral lithium salicylate produced steady lithium levels up to 48 hours in rats without the toxic spike associated with the rapid absorption of current FDA-approved lithium ...

What's the upside of feeling too sad for chocolate?

2014-03-11

The instant gratification and the pleasure derived from consuming excessive chocolate and deep-fried foods can lead way to a double-edged sword of negative consequences ranging from weight gain to feelings of low self-esteem. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, combating this type of self-destructive behavior may be achieved simply by making a person feel sad. "We found that when people who are sad are exposed to pictures of indulgent food or indulgent words, their sadness highlights the negative consequences of indulging and encourages them ...

Restoring order in the brain

2014-03-11

Alzheimer's disease is the most widespread degenerative neurological disorder in the world. Over five million Americans live with it, and one in three senior citizens will die with the disease or a similar form of dementia. While memory loss is a common symptom of Alzheimer's, other behavioral manifestations — depression, loss of inhibition, delusions, agitation, anxiety, and aggression — can be even more challenging for victims and their families to live with. Now Prof. Daniel Offen and Dr. Adi Shruster of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine have discovered ...