Interaction and Influence on Twitter

Abstract

The internet and social media have led to a change in the structure of the public sphere in comparison to traditional mass media. On the internet, private actors have the possibility to participate in public discourse and bypass news media to directly interact with each other as well as with public actors such as political representatives. The questions of the type of interaction, the degree of influence, and possible topic-specific differences, however, remain unclear. We conducted a content analysis of the user types, forms of interaction, and practices of retweeting and linking in 17,629 tweets on five topics and found topic-specific differences in the interaction between news media, public actors, and private actors. Overall, news media still hold an important role in information flow and are linked to and retweeted most often by all user types. However, in crisis situations, the messages of private actors also find uptake.

Keywords:

• public sphere
• Twitter
• topic comparison
• user types

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Notes on contributors

Sanja Kapidzic

Sanja Kapidzic (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Communication Studies and Media Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Germany. Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Christoph Neuberger

Christoph Neuberger Department of Communication Studies and Media Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

Stefan Stieglitz

Stefan Stieglitz Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, Forsthausweg 2, 47057 Duisburg, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

Milad Mirbabaie

Milad Mirbabaie Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, Forsthausweg 2, 47057 Duisburg, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]