Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing social media for influence spread during major events, which is important for researchers and policymakers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts like convos.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting deliberate influence operations in social media by filtering essential messages with influence indicators from chaotic traffic, presenting a novel approach to extract agenda control and emotional language indicators from group discussions.
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.