Event Triggered Social Media Chatter: A New Modeling Framework

In this paper, we develop a new modeling framework for the event-triggered social media chatter. The new framework is inspired by the two well-established modeling frameworks—the ignorant-spreader-recovered model for information spread and the Sethi model for marketing. This paper discusses various microscopic and macroscopic approaches and the need for an integrated model. Starting from the existing models, we argue and propose the new model. This paper also proposes the idea of a basic reproductive rate
$R_{0}$
applied to social media information spread under a marketing-model-based framework. Following that, two case studies are presented from compiled Twitter data as examples of event-based social media triggers (
#shooting
) and social movements (
#MeToo
). The resulting data are compared with our proposed model. Model parameters are estimated using nonlinear estimation methods. Results are found to be encouraging and are discussed in the end to support and validate the proposed framework.