Abstract
Twitter and other microblogs have rapidly become a significant means
by which people communicate with the world and each other in near
realtime. There has been a large number of studies surrounding these
social media, focusing on areas such as information spread, various
centrality measures, topic detection and more. However, one area which
has not received much attention is trying to better understand what
information is being spread and why it is being spread. This work
looks to get a better understanding of what makes people spread
information in tweets or microblogs through the use of retweeting.
Several retweet behavior models are presented and evaluated on a
Twitter data set consisting of over 768,000 tweets gathered from
monitoring over 30,000 users for a period of one month. We evaluate
the proposed models against each user and show how people use
different retweet behavior models. For example, we find that although
users in the majority of cases do not retweet information on topics
that they themselves Tweet about as or from people who are ``like
them'' (hence anti-homophily), we do find that models which do take
homophily, or similarity, into account fits the observed retweet
behaviors much better than other more general models which do not take
this into account. We further find that, not surprisingly, people's
retweeting behavior is better explained through multiple different
models rather than one model.