Interactive analysis of tweet diffusion from the University of Colorado Boulder
@jenningatcu,
@melissabica,
@palen,
Jim Dykes,
Hande Batan
Each circle on these graphs indicates a retweet (not quote tweets nor replies) of a specific tweet. The size of the dot is proportional to the number of followers that the retweeter has (a proxy for the size of the potential audience exposed to the retweet). The vertical location of the dot is the cumulative sum of the number of followers for each retweeter. The Y-axis then represents the potential size of the audience that has been exposed to that tweet over time. These graphs show the most retweetd tweets for each collection, typically the top 25. See the example at the bottom of this page for more information.
Click on a graph to see the interactive version:
World Health Organization (@who)
Center for Disease Control
Keywords: @cdcgov or @cdcemergency
Top Retweeted US Governors
Covid + Map
Covid + Data
Covid + Chart/Graphic/Datavis
For individual accounts such as @WHO, @CDCGov, or all of the US Governors, we use the follow request parameter of the realtime filter Twitter API. This returns all of the tweets posted by a specific user as well as all retweets of and replies to that user. For keyword collections (such as "coronavirus maps", we use the track API request parameter for a standard keyword search.
This work extends the the methodology by Bica et al. to measure and show the differences in diffusion of risk imagery on Twitter during Hurricanes: Melissa Bica, Julie L. Demuth, James E. Dykes, and Leysia Palen. (2019). Communicating Hurricane Risks: Multi-Method Examination of Risk Imagery Diffusion. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19, Glasgow, UK).
| Day | Action | Y-Value | Dot Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tweet posted by user with 100k followers | 100,000 | Small |
| 2 | Retweeted by a user with 2M followers | 2,100,000 | Large |
| 3 | Retweeted by user with 500k followers | 2,600,000 | Medium |
| 4 | Retweeted by another user with 500k followers | 3,100,000 | Medium |
| 5 | Retweeted by user with 50k followers | 3,150,000 | Small |
| 6 | Retweeted by another user with 50k followers | 3,200,000 | Small |
Since initially tweeted, this tweet has been retweeted to an audience of potentially 3.2M users. In this way, we use a retweeting user's follower count as a proxy for the number of users who may have seen the tweet.
