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measures used to identify important nodes. By visualizing the network, we can aid
in further analysis of important nodes, by identifying information propagation paths,
as well as observing the interaction between information producers and consumers,
which cannot be effectively conveyed by measures alone.
Retweets are marked by the characteristic prefix “RT” followed by the name of
the user who originally published the Tweet. For example, consider the following
Tweet published by the user John:
RT @Peter: Full-time: Chelsea 3-1 Steaua Bucharest. (3-2 on agg) and we're through to the
quarter-finals. #CFC
Here “Peter” is the name of the user who originally posted the Tweet, which
was retweeted by “John”. Using this information, an information flow network
can be created by connecting information producers with information consumers.
When collecting Tweets, one can identify retweets by checking for the presence
of the element “retweeted_status” in the JSON response. As an example, a part of
the element is presented in Listing 5.1 .
5.1.1.1
Retweet Network Fallacy
An important yet subtle property of this network is that one can only identify
the original source of the information and not the intermediate users along the
information propagation path. For example consider the above example and imag-
ine two users “Alice” and “Bob” who retweet the Tweet from “John”. The
“retweeted_status” element of this Tweet will contain the original producer of the
Tweet i.e., “Peter” as the source of the Tweet. In Fig. 5.1 a. We can see that the tweet
from “Peter” is retweeted by “John”, which is subsequently retweeted by “Alice”
and “Bob”. However, when these Tweets are collected via the Twitter APIs, we only
observe the propagation path seen in Fig. 5.1 b. This means that we cannot identify
the full path of propagation, but only the source and the destination.
Listing 5.1
Retweet object inside a Tweet object
{
//Other Tweet elements
...
"created_at" : "Thu Mar 14 23:25:03 +0000 2013" ,
"text" : "RT @Peter: Full-time: Chelsea 3-1 Steaua Bucharest
. (3-2 on agg) and we're through to the quarter-finals.
#CFC" ,
"retweeted_status" :{
"text" : "Full-time: Chelsea 3-1 Steaua Bucharest. (3-2
on agg) and we're through to the quarter-finals. #
CFC" ,
"retweeted" : true,
...
//other retweet elements
}
 
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