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Higher-Order Communication Processes on Social Media: A Case Study of Australian Politics on Twitter (#auspol)

Fri, May 25, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton Prague, Floor: M, Hilton Grand Ballroom

Abstract

Network analysis of Twitter often involves conceptualising Twitter users as network nodes and actions such as reply, mention, retweet or follow as network edges. Networks involving hashtags can also be constructed, for example, two-mode networks with directed edges from Twitter users to the hashtags they have used in tweets, or semantic networks showing links between hashtags based on co-occurrence in tweets. In this paper we adapt recent methods in higher-order networks to the study of communication processes on Twitter in the context of Australian politics, using a dataset of #auspol Tweets collected over a period of one year. We show that the implicit Markov assumption of conventional first-order networks does not adequately represent the higher-order dependencies that underpin hashtags as a complex system of communication. In other words, representing higher-order dependencies between hashtags significantly reconfigures our understanding of the communication process as a complex network.

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