Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini

TL;DR
This study analyzes how Twitter trends originate and spread across different US regions, revealing local clusters and global hubs that influence nationwide popularity, and draws parallels between trend dissemination and disease spread.
Contribution
It provides a detailed characterization of the geographic origins and pathways of Twitter trends, highlighting the role of air traffic hubs as trendsetters and exploring the dynamics of local versus global trend emergence.
Findings
Local trends cluster in East coast, Midwest, and Southwest regions.
Major air traffic hubs act as global trend origin points.
Trends from hubs tend to spread faster across the country.
Abstract
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as they are driven by activity in specific geographic areas that act as sources of traffic and information flow. Taken independently, trends and geography have been discussed in recent literature on online social media; although, so far, little has been done to characterize the relation between trends and geography. Here we investigate more than eleven thousand topics that trended on Twitter in 63 main US locations during a period of 50 days in 2013. This data allows us to study the origins and pathways of trends, how they compete for popularity at the local level to emerge as winners at the country level, and what dynamics underlie their production and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHuman Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Data-Driven Disease Surveillance
