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arXiv · 2011.11010

Mining Influentials and their Bot Activities on Twitter Campaigns

Shanika Karunasekera·Kwan Hui Lim·Aaron Harwood
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Abstract

Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter campaigns, which includes: (i) collecting tweets and detecting topics relating to a campaign; (ii) mining important campaign topics using scientometrics measures; (iii) modelling user interests using hashtags and topical entropy; (iv) identifying influential users using an adapted PageRank score; and (v) various metrics and visualization techniques for identifying bot-like activities. While this methodology is generalizable to multiple campaign types, we demonstrate its effectiveness on the 2017 German federal election.

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Shanika Karunasekera, Kwan Hui Lim, Aaron Harwood. 2020-11-22. Mining Influentials and their Bot Activities on Twitter Campaigns. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.11010

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