Twitter as Social Sensor: Dynamics and Structure in Major Sporting Events

Abstract

Twitter often behaves like a “social sensor” in which users actively sense real-world events and spontaneously mention these events in cyberspace. Here, we study the temporal dynamics and structural properties of Twitter as a social sensor in major sporting events. By examining Japanese professional baseball games, we found that Twitter as a social sensor can immediately show reactions to positive and negative events by a burst of tweets, but only positive events induce a burst of retweets to follow. In addition, retweet networks during the baseball games exhibit clear polarization in user clusters depending on baseball teams, as well as a scalefree in-degree distribution. These empirical findings provide mechanistic insights into the emergence and evolution of social sensors.