The power of comments： fostering social interactions in microblog networks

• Published in: Frontiers of Computer Science 2016-10, Vol.10 (5), p.889-907
• Main Authors: WANG, Tianyi, CHEN, Yang, WANG, Yi, WANG, Bolun, WANG, Gang, LI, Xing, ZHENG, Haitao, ZHAO, Ben Y.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: comments; Computer Science; Microblogs; News; Research Article; social and interaction graph; Social factors; Social networks; User behavior; 数据驱动; 新闻传播; 用户检测; 用户行为; 社会交往; 社会网络; 网络服务; 评论
• ISSN: 2095-2228; 2095-2236
• DOI: 10.1007/s11704-016-5198-y

Today＇s ubiquitous online social networks serve multiple purposes, including social communication （Face- book, Renren）, and news dissemination （Twitter）. But how does a social network＇s design define its functionality？ An- swering this would need social network providers to take a proactive role in defining and guiding user behavior. In this paper, we first take a step to answer this question with a data-driven approach, through measurement and anal- ysis of the Sina Weibo microblogging service. Often com- pared to Twitter because of its format, Weibo is interesting for our analysis because it serves as a social communication tool and a platform for news dissemination, too. While similar to Twitter in functionality, Weibo provides a distinguishing feature, comments, allowing users to form threaded con- versations around a single tweet. Our study focuses on this feature, and how it contributes to interactions and improves social engagement. We use analysis of comment interactions to uncover their role in social interactivity, and use comment graphs to demonstrate the structure of Weibo users interac- tions. Finally, we present a case study that shows the impact of comments in malicious user detection, a key application on microblogging systems. That is, using properties of com- ments significantly improves the accuracy in both modeling and detection of malicious users.