Identifying spreading sources and influential nodes of hot events on social networks

Abstract

The rapid development of World Wide Web accelerates information spreading in various ways. Thanks to the emergence of multiple social platforms, some events which are not much attractive in the past can become social hot spots nowadays. In this paper, we study the information diffusion process of “IP MAN3 box office fraud”, which is widely diffused in the largest Chinese microblogging system, namely Sina Weibo, in March 2016. Based on the temporal metric we have proposed, we succeed in finding out the sources of the information, and constructing the panorama of the diffusion process. In addition, a portion of nodes that promote the diffusion are identified by using the node importance algorithms. Finally, the users with abnormal behaviors in the process of event development are identified.