The topology of a discussion: the #occupy case
Floriana Gargiulo, Jacopo Bindi, Andrea Apolloni

TL;DR
This study examines the Twitter discussion around Occupy Wall Street using network analysis to reveal the structure, key actors, community formation, and evolution of the movement's online discourse over time.
Contribution
It introduces a bipartite network approach to analyze the semantic and user interaction structures in social movement discussions on Twitter.
Findings
Identification of key communication hubs and their roles.
Emergence of two user classes: professionals and amateurs.
Distinct community structures aligned with movement phases.
Abstract
We analyse a large sample of the Twitter activity developed around the social movement 'Occupy Wall Street' to study the complex interactions between the human communication activity and the semantic content of a discussion. We use a network approach based on the analysis of the bipartite graph @Users-#Hashtags and of its projections: the 'semantic network', whose nodes are hashtags, and the 'users interest network', whose nodes are users In the first instance, we find out that discussion topics (#hashtags) present a high heterogeneity, with the distinct role of the communication hubs where most the 'opinion traffic' passes through. In the second case, the self-organization process of users activity leads to the emergence of two classes of communicators: the 'professionals' and the 'amateurs'. Moreover the network presents a strong community structure, based on the differentiation of…
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