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Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities

Bow-tie structures were introduced to describe the World Wide Web (WWW): in the direct network in which the nodes are the websites and the edges are the hyperlinks connecting them, the greatest number of nodes takes part to a bow-tie, i.e. a Weakly Connected Component (WCC) composed of 3 main sector...

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Autores principales: Mattei, Mattia, Pratelli, Manuel, Caldarelli, Guido, Petrocchi, Marinella, Saracco, Fabio
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9332050/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35902625
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16603-7
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author Mattei, Mattia
Pratelli, Manuel
Caldarelli, Guido
Petrocchi, Marinella
Saracco, Fabio
author_facet Mattei, Mattia
Pratelli, Manuel
Caldarelli, Guido
Petrocchi, Marinella
Saracco, Fabio
author_sort Mattei, Mattia
collection PubMed
description Bow-tie structures were introduced to describe the World Wide Web (WWW): in the direct network in which the nodes are the websites and the edges are the hyperlinks connecting them, the greatest number of nodes takes part to a bow-tie, i.e. a Weakly Connected Component (WCC) composed of 3 main sectors: IN, OUT and SCC. SCC is the main Strongly Connected Component of WCC, i.e. the greatest subgraph in which each node is reachable by any other one. The IN and OUT sectors are the set of nodes not included in SCC that, respectively, can access and are accessible to nodes in SCC. In the WWW, the greatest part of the websites can be found in the SCC, while the search engines belong to IN and the authorities, as Wikipedia, are in OUT. In the analysis of Twitter debate, the recent literature focused on discursive communities, i.e. clusters of accounts interacting among themselves via retweets. In the present work, we studied discursive communities in 8 different thematic Twitter datasets in various languages. Surprisingly, we observed that almost all discursive communities therein display a bow-tie structure during political or societal debates. Instead, they are absent when the argument of the discussion is different as sport events, as in the case of Euro2020 Turkish and Italian datasets. We furthermore analysed the quality of the content created in the various sectors of the different discursive communities, using the domain annotation from the fact-checking website Newsguard: we observe that, when the discursive community is affected by m/disinformation, the content with the lowest quality is the one produced and shared in SCC and, in particular, a strong incidence of low- or non-reputable messages is present in the flow of retweets between the SCC and the OUT sectors. In this sense, in discursive communities affected by m/disinformation, the greatest part of the accounts has access to a great variety of contents, but whose quality is, in general, quite low; such a situation perfectly describes the phenomenon of infodemic, i.e. the access to “an excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution”, according to WHO.
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spelling pubmed-93320502022-07-28 Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities Mattei, Mattia Pratelli, Manuel Caldarelli, Guido Petrocchi, Marinella Saracco, Fabio Sci Rep Article Bow-tie structures were introduced to describe the World Wide Web (WWW): in the direct network in which the nodes are the websites and the edges are the hyperlinks connecting them, the greatest number of nodes takes part to a bow-tie, i.e. a Weakly Connected Component (WCC) composed of 3 main sectors: IN, OUT and SCC. SCC is the main Strongly Connected Component of WCC, i.e. the greatest subgraph in which each node is reachable by any other one. The IN and OUT sectors are the set of nodes not included in SCC that, respectively, can access and are accessible to nodes in SCC. In the WWW, the greatest part of the websites can be found in the SCC, while the search engines belong to IN and the authorities, as Wikipedia, are in OUT. In the analysis of Twitter debate, the recent literature focused on discursive communities, i.e. clusters of accounts interacting among themselves via retweets. In the present work, we studied discursive communities in 8 different thematic Twitter datasets in various languages. Surprisingly, we observed that almost all discursive communities therein display a bow-tie structure during political or societal debates. Instead, they are absent when the argument of the discussion is different as sport events, as in the case of Euro2020 Turkish and Italian datasets. We furthermore analysed the quality of the content created in the various sectors of the different discursive communities, using the domain annotation from the fact-checking website Newsguard: we observe that, when the discursive community is affected by m/disinformation, the content with the lowest quality is the one produced and shared in SCC and, in particular, a strong incidence of low- or non-reputable messages is present in the flow of retweets between the SCC and the OUT sectors. In this sense, in discursive communities affected by m/disinformation, the greatest part of the accounts has access to a great variety of contents, but whose quality is, in general, quite low; such a situation perfectly describes the phenomenon of infodemic, i.e. the access to “an excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution”, according to WHO. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-07-28 /pmc/articles/PMC9332050/ /pubmed/35902625 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16603-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Mattei, Mattia
Pratelli, Manuel
Caldarelli, Guido
Petrocchi, Marinella
Saracco, Fabio
Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
title Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
title_full Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
title_fullStr Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
title_full_unstemmed Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
title_short Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
title_sort bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9332050/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35902625
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16603-7
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