Activity Profiles in Online Social Media

Mohamed Faouzi Atig, Sofia Cassel, Lisa Kaati Amendra Shrestha

Overview

• Trends in social media• What is an activity profile?• Experiments • Future work

Online Social Networks• 1.6 billion social network users• 64% of Internet users

– spend time, stay in contact, catching up news• Most popular social network sites

– Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter• Examples of user generated content

– text– images– multimedia

Statistics from: http://www.statista.com/markets/424/topic/540/social-media-user-generated-content/

Behavior in Social Media

• People make use of multiple accounts• Free and easy to change identity• Personal information is available on the Internet

– communication pattern– writing style– geographical tags– IP addresses– web browser history– search patterns

Objectives

• To what extent can we group people with similar communication patterns?

• Experiment on boards.ie discussion forum

Activity Profile• Users most and least active period• Chronotypes

– morning type, evening type or neutral– stable over time

• Use of temporal information from posts• Divided each day into 6 periods

– information gain• Activity profiles consist of:

– first activity peak– sleeping peak– second activity peak

Activity Profile

UsersFirst Activity PeakSleeping Activity PeakSecond Activity Peak

Activity Profile

Experiment

• Activity Profile– create an activity profile for each user– similar activity pattern

• at least two same activity period• at least one inactivity period

• Multiple Aliases– activity profiles– stylometry and post time analysis

Data

• Irish discussion forum boards.ie data• Available data

– 11 years data– 50 GB of disk space– 9 million documents

• Used data– 2003 year data for activity profile– 2008 year data for multiple aliases

Activity Profiles

Results

Activity Profile Multiple Aliases

Summary

• Capture activity profiles of Internet users• Group Internet users with similar behavior• Activity profiles can be used to detect multiple

aliases• Minimize analysis time

Future Work

• Dynamic methods for activity peaks• Cross-platform experiments• Large-scale experiments

Thank You