Exploring Controversy in Twitter

TL;DR

This paper presents a system that analyzes Twitter discussions to identify and visualize controversial topics by computing controversy scores based on user interactions, aiding understanding of social debates.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel system that automatically measures controversy in Twitter topics and provides visual and interactive tools for exploration and analysis.

Findings

Effective controversy scoring based on user interactions

Visualizations help interpret controversy levels

System enables exploration of Twitter debates

Abstract

Among the topics discussed on social media, some spark more heated debate than others. For example, experience suggests that major political events, such as a vote for healthcare law in the US, would spark more debate between opposing sides than other events, such as a concert of a popular music band. Exploring the topics of discussion on Twitter and understanding which ones are controversial is extremely useful for a variety of purposes, such as for journalists to understand what issues divide the public, or for social scientists to understand how controversy is manifested in social interactions. The system we present processes the daily trending topics discussed on the platform, and assigns to each topic a controversy score, which is computed based on the interactions among Twitter users, and a visualization of these interactions, which provides an intuitive visual cue regarding the controversy of the topic. The system also allows users to explore the messages (tweets) associated with each topic, and sort and explore the topics by different criteria (e.g., by controversy score, time, or related keywords).