Reading the Correct History? Modeling Temporal Intention in Resource Sharing

TL;DR

This paper explores modeling user temporal intention in social media link sharing to understand how timing affects the interpretation of shared resources and their historical integrity.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of temporal intention modeling for social media links and analyzes how timing impacts content consistency and archival quality.

Findings

Features from posts, resources, and social patterns can predict user intent.

Temporal intention modeling improves understanding of content changes over time.

Analyzing shared resources reveals insights into social media's historical integrity.

Abstract

The web is trapped in the "perpetual now", and when users traverse from page to page, they are seeing the state of the web resource (i.e., the page) as it exists at the time of the click and not necessarily at the time when the link was made. Thus, a temporal discrepancy can arise between the resource at the time the page author created a link to it and the time when a reader follows the link. This is especially important in the context of social media: the ease of sharing links in a tweet or Facebook post allows many people to author web content, but the space constraints combined with poor awareness by authors often prevents sufficient context from being generated to determine the intent of the post. If the links are clicked as soon as they are shared, the temporal distance between sharing and clicking is so small that there is little to no difference in content. However, not all clicks occur immediately, and a delay of days or even hours can result in reading something other than what the author intended. We introduce the concept of a user's temporal intention upon publishing a link in social media. We investigate the features that could be extracted from the post, the linked resource, and the patterns of social dissemination to model this user intention. Finally, we analyze the historical integrity of the shared resources in social media across time. In other words, how much is the knowledge of the author's intent beneficial in maintaining the consistency of the story being told through social posts and in enriching the archived content coverage and depth of vulnerable resources?