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The power of comments: fostering social interactions in microblog networks

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Abstract

Today’s ubiquitous online social networks serve multiple purposes, including social communication (Facebook, Renren), and news dissemination (Twitter). But how does a social network’s design define its functionality? Answering 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 analysis of the Sina Weibo microblogging service. Often compared 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 conversations 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 interactions. 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 comments significantly improves the accuracy in both modeling Received May 20, 2015; accepted October 29, 2015 E-mail: chenyang@fudan.edu.cn and detection of malicious users.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Tianyi Wang & Xing Li

  2. Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Beijing, 100084, China

    Tianyi Wang & Xing Li

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106-5110, USA

    Tianyi Wang, Bolun Wang, Gang Wang, Haitao Zheng & Ben Y. Zhao

  4. School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 201203, China

    Yang Chen

  5. Department of Mathematics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 13244-1150, USA

    Yi Wang

Authors
  1. Tianyi Wang
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  2. Yang Chen
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  5. Gang Wang
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Correspondence to Yang Chen.

Additional information

Tianyi Wang is a PhD student in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China. He was a visiting student at the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. His research interests include data mining, the analysis and modeling of online social networks.

Yang Chen is a pre-tenure associate professor within the School of Computer Science at Fudan University, China. Before that, he was a postdoctoral associate within the Department of Computer Science at Duke University from 2011 to 2014. He received his BS and PhD degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China in 2004 and 2009, respectively. His research interests include online social networks, Internet architectures, and cloud computing. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Yi Wang received her diploma in mathematics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in 2005. From 2006 to 2012, she was with the University of Minnesota, USA, where she received her MS in statistics and PhD in mathematics. Between 2012 and 2015, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), USA, and a visiting assistant professor at the Mathematics Department, Duke University, USA. Since 2015, she joined as an assistant professor the Department of Mathematics at Syracuse University, USA. Her research interests lie in applied harmonic analysis, machine learning, signal and image processing, as well as applications to real data.

Bolun Wang is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He received his BS degree from Tsinghua University, China in 2009. His research interests are online social networks, data security, and privacy.

Gang Wang received his BE degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, China in 2010. He is currently pursuing the PhD degree in computer science in the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. His research interests are security and privacy, online social networks, mobile networks and crowdsourcing systems.

Xing Li received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, USA. He is a professor with the Electronic Engineering Department, Tsinghua University, China and the deputy director of China Education and Research Network (CERNET) Center.

Haitao Zheng received her BS degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in July 1995, and her MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from University of Maryland, College Park, USA in May 1998 and July 1999, respectively. She joined wireless research lab, Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies as a member of technical staff in August 1999, and moved to Microsoft Research Asia as a project leader and researcher, in March 2004. Since September 2005, she has been a faculty member in Computer Science Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, where she is now a professor. She was named as the 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review Top 35 Innovators under the age of 35 for her work on cognitive radios. Her work was selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the 10 Emerging Technologies in 2006. She also received 2002 Bell Laboratories President’s Gold Award from Lucent Bell-Labs, and 1998–1999 George Harhalakis Outstanding Graduate Student Award from Institute of System Research, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She was elected IEEE fellow in 2014. Her recent research interests include wireless systems and networking and social networks.

Ben Y. Zhao is a professor at the Computer Science department, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He completed his MS and PhD degrees in computer science at University of California-Berkeley, USA (2000, 2004), and his BS from Yale University, USA (1997). He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review’s TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), and ComputerWorld Magazine’s Top 40 Technology Innovators award. His work has been covered by media outlets such as New York Times, Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, and Slashdot. He has published over 100 publications in areas of security and privacy, networked and distributed systems, wireless networks and data-intensive computing. Finally, he has served as program chair for top conferences (WOSN,WWW2013 OSN track, IPTPS, IEEE P2P), and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN).

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Wang, T., Chen, Y., Wang, Y. et al. The power of comments: fostering social interactions in microblog networks. Front. Comput. Sci. 10, 889–907 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-5198-y

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