Following relationship based empirical analysis of microblog user reposting behavior

摘要

Reposting, as the key mechanism to facilitate information propagation in microblogs, is gaining more and more attention by public and academics. In order to analyze the interactions between users and further overcome the ambiguity of motivation for small-granularity analyses, statistics from the perspective of individuals were proposed. It was found that reposting sequences exhibited power-law characteristics in both overall and following relationship based situations, as well as total number of reposts and the interval time of reposting decisions. Further study proved that bidirectional relationships played a more important role in long-term reposting decisions in spite of low proportion of population.