Twittersphere and Fireworks...

Figure 2: Sample conversation graphs with retweet (top) and follow (bottom) features (visualized using the force directed layout algorithm in Gephi). The left side is controversial, (a,e) #beefban, (b,f) #russia march, while the right side is non-controversial, (c,g) #sxsw, (d,h) #germanwings.

Topics: Computer Science, History, Humor, Internet, Politics, Social Media

Poignantly, today is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; as a species we entered the era where mass extinction became a troubling, crystallized thought. The BBC has a short presentation on their web site commemorating this history.

Equally significant and jarring: The first presidential debates are tonight from a party on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, that has made disenfranchising minorities from the voting booths for a non-existent problem a political tactic. That, thanks to 5 justices on the Supreme Court (ONE which I can arguably say left the African American community despite his physical attributes decades ago), gutting the provision that covered nine states, eight of which in the old Confederacy. A conservative circuit court with clearer legal vision saw through the canard in Texas and put full stop to that dark procedure in the Lone Star State.

I will fortunately be at work during this "debate." I can only stomach so much bombast and hyperbolic over-the-top rhetoric. I'll likely look at the analysis, soundbites and yes: Tweets.

Sadly, like most of us, I'll be looking for the "fireworks."

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Many a controversy has raged on social media platforms such as Twitter. Some last for weeks or months, others blow themselves in an afternoon. And yet most go unnoticed by most people. That would change if there was a reliable way of spotting controversies in the Twitterstream in real time.

That could happen thanks to the work of Kiran Garimella and pals at Aalto University in Finland. These guys have found a way to spot the characteristics of a controversy in a collection of tweets and distinguish this from a noncontroversial conversation.

Various researchers have studied controversies on Twitter but these have all focused on preidentified arguments, whereas Garimella and co want to spot them in the first place. Their key idea is that the structure of conversations that involve controversy are different from those that are benign.

Physics arXiv: Quantifying Controversy in Social Media
Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, Michael Mathioudakis