research-article

Negative Messages Spread Rapidly and Widely on Social Media

Authors:

Sho Tsugawa and

Hiroyuki OhsakiAuthors Info & Claims

COSN '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks

November 2015

Pages 151 - 160

https://doi.org/10.1145/2817946.2817962

Published: 02 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate the relation between the sentiment of a message on social media and its virality, defined as the volume and the speed of message diffusion. We analyze 4.1 million messages (tweets) obtained from Twitter. Although factors affecting message diffusion on social media have been studied previously, we focus on message sentiment, and reveal how the polarity of message sentiment affects its virality. The virality of a message is measured by the number of message repostings (retweets) and the time elapsed from the original posting of a message to its Nth reposting (N-retweet time). Through extensive analyses, we find that negative messages are likely to be reposted more rapidly and frequently than positive and neutral messages. Specifically, the reposting volume of negative messages is 1.2--1.6-fold that of positive and neutral messages, and negative messages spread at 1.25 times the speed of positive and neutral messages when the diffusion volume is large.

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Cited By

Lee SPark T(2024)Monitoring Public Interest and Sentiment on Basic Income: Using Google and Twitter Data in the U.S.Basic Income Studies10.1515/bis-2023-000219:1(31-49)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1515/bis-2023-0002
Peters UQuintana I(2024)Are generics and negativity about social groups common on social media? A comparative analysis of Twitter (X) dataSynthese10.1007/s11229-024-04639-3203:6Online publication date: 12-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04639-3
Mao H(2023)Negative Sentiment Shift on a Chinese Movie-Rating WebsiteJournal of Social Computing10.23919/JSC.2023.00144:2(168-180)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2023.0014
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Index Terms

Negative Messages Spread Rapidly and Widely on Social Media
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

COSN '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks

November 2015

280 pages

ISBN:9781450339513

DOI:10.1145/2817946

General Chair:
Aneesh Sharma
Twitter, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Rakesh Agrawal
Data Insights Laboratories, USA
,
Matthias Grossglauser
EPFL, Switzerland

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 November 2015

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Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

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COSN'15

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ACM

COSN'15: Conference on Online Social Networks

November 2 - 3, 2015

California, Palo Alto, USA

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COSN '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 82 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 307 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Lee SPark T(2024)Monitoring Public Interest and Sentiment on Basic Income: Using Google and Twitter Data in the U.S.Basic Income Studies10.1515/bis-2023-000219:1(31-49)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1515/bis-2023-0002
Peters UQuintana I(2024)Are generics and negativity about social groups common on social media? A comparative analysis of Twitter (X) dataSynthese10.1007/s11229-024-04639-3203:6Online publication date: 12-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04639-3
Mao H(2023)Negative Sentiment Shift on a Chinese Movie-Rating WebsiteJournal of Social Computing10.23919/JSC.2023.00144:2(168-180)Online publication date: Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2023.0014
Kritika KRingland K(2023)'You are finally Home': Centering Playful Marginalized Community Values in Designing Online Social PlatformsCompanion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3584931.3606999(81-85)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3584931.3606999
Hussain SPascaru OPriporas CForoudi PMelewar TDennis C(2023)Examining the effects of celebrity negative publicity on attitude to, and reputation of, brand and corporation, directly and based on moderating factorsEuropean Business Review10.1108/EBR-05-2022-009835:4(469-499)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/EBR-05-2022-0098
Muraro IThorson KHuddleston P(2023)Spurring and sustaining online consumer activism: the role of cause support and brand relationship in microlevel action framesJournal of Brand Management10.1057/s41262-023-00322-z30:5(461-477)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-023-00322-z
Antypas DPreece ACamacho-Collados J(2023)Negativity spreads faster: A large-scale multilingual twitter analysis on the role of sentiment in political communicationOnline Social Networks and Media10.1016/j.osnem.2023.10024233(100242)Online publication date: Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2023.100242
Luo HMeng XZhao YCai M(2023)Exploring the impact of sentiment on multi-dimensional information dissemination using COVID-19 data in ChinaComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2023.107733144:COnline publication date: 1-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107733
Logan ALaCasse PLunday B(2023)Social network analysis of Twitter interactions: a directed multilayer network approachSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-023-01063-213:1Online publication date: 7-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-023-01063-2
Hai-Jew S(2022)Frugal Living for Our Collective and Mutual #Bestlife on a Distributed and Global Electronic Hive MindResearch Anthology on Usage, Identity, and Impact of Social Media on Society and Culture10.4018/978-1-6684-6307-9.ch040(736-768)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
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