The diversity of social media platforms, users and uses has long been a challenge for social media research. The difficulty of inferring meaning from social media acts is also, and… Click to show full abstract
The diversity of social media platforms, users and uses has long been a challenge for social media research. The difficulty of inferring meaning from social media acts is also, and perhaps more importantly, due to the fact the even identical acts that are in appearance identical and that occur on the same platforms and contexts can have diverse meanings. This paper proposes a model based on the concepts of social and topical distance that can help shed light on the possible meanings of a social media act. The model considers the social relationship between the content creator and the user, as well as the topical relationship between the content the user's main topics of interest. It is demonstrated by analyzing a set of papers published in JASIST that were tweeted by researchers. The results show that the model can help differentiate between different types of heterogeneous social media acts and users or be used to characterize the attention that a specific content has received on social media.
               
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