@inproceedings{bhaumik-etal-2024-social,
    title = "Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media",
    author = "Bhaumik, Ankita  and
      Sa, Ning  and
      Katsios, Gregorios  and
      Strzalkowski, Tomek",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1303",
    pages = "14984--14994",
    abstract = "Social media platforms are popular tools for disseminating targeted information during major public events like elections or pandemics. Systematic analysis of the message traffic can provide valuable insights into prevailing opinions and social dynamics among different segments of the population. We are specifically interested in influence spread, and in particular whether more deliberate influence operations can be detected. However, filtering out the essential messages with telltale influence indicators from the extensive and often chaotic social media traffic is a major challenge.In this paper we present a novel approach to extract influence indicators from messages circulating among groups of users discussing particular topics. We build upon the the concept of a convo to identify influential authors who are actively promoting some particular agenda around that topic within the group. We focus on two influence indicators: the (control of) agenda and the use of emotional language.",
}

Social media platforms are popular tools for disseminating targeted information during major public events like elections or pandemics. Systematic analysis of the message traffic can provide valuable insights into prevailing opinions and social dynamics among different segments of the population. We are specifically interested in influence spread, and in particular whether more deliberate influence operations can be detected. However, filtering out the essential messages with telltale influence indicators from the extensive and often chaotic social media traffic is a major challenge.In this paper we present a novel approach to extract influence indicators from messages circulating among groups of users discussing particular topics. We build upon the the concept of a convo to identify influential authors who are actively promoting some particular agenda around that topic within the group. We focus on two influence indicators: the (control of) agenda and the use of emotional language.
Bhaumik, Ankita Sa, Ning Katsios, Gregorios Strzalkowski, Tomek
Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media