by Miranda Mowbray (HP Labs, UK)

 

 

Internet Science is a multidisciplinary research area which considers the Internet both from a technical perspective and from the perspective of the social sciences. This talk is about Twitter, seen as a techno-social network. The talk will include both some older results and results from some very recent data analysis.

 

Data from Twitter can give insights into offline social behaviour, and wider results about human social systems can be applied to understanding some behaviour on Twitter. A particular feature of some social networks, including Twitter, is that software programmes can act within them in a similar way to human beings - indeed, in some cases it may not be obvious whether you are communicating with a human being or a piece of software.

 

Twitter can thus be thought of as a social network connecting both people and software programmes as peers, whose behaviour is influenced by a delicate interplay of social and technical factors. (Economic and business-related factors are also involved.) There has been a rapid increase in the amount of automated use of Twitter. This talk will give some examples of such use, and discuss potential privacy and security consequences for Twitter, and for online social networks in general.