New Social Media Tools Help Public Assess Viral Posts, Check for Bots
hubie writes:
New social media tools help public assess viral posts, check for bots:
The Observatory on Social Media, or OSoMe, at Indiana University has launched three new or revamped no-cost research tools to give journalists, other researchers and the public a broad view of what's happening on social media.
[...] "You often hear something is going viral, but how?" said Filippo Menczer, director of OSoMe and Luddy Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Informatics in the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. "Our tools show you what the conversation is, who the players are, what the viral messages are, and you can even visualize polarization. It provides a place for exploration of topics and how they work together."
- The Networks Tool, which has recently been updated, creates an interactive map (now in 3D) to explore how information spreads across Twitter. Users can visualize who is retweeting or mentioning whom on a particular topic, or which hashtags are being used with other hashtags, and all data can now be exported. [...]
- The Trends Tool helps users analyze the volume of tweets within a given hashtag, URL or keyword over a given period of time. This tool shows which topics are trending and what is going viral. [...]
- The new BotAmp Tool enables users to pinpoint likely bot activity for tweets filtered by a search term. [...]
[...] OSoMe's tools leverage a huge stream of data -- roughly 50 million tweets a day -- collected from Twitter. It equates to roughly 10 percent of public tweets, which are then analyzed and indexed for use through these tools.
[...] "There's always a lot of debate about what's going on online," he said. "These tools are meant to help the public study these things and see for themselves."
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