Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data

Abstract

At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk concluded his acquisition of Twitter. In the weeks and months before that, several questions were publicly discussed that were not only of interest to the platform's future buyers, but also of high relevance to the Computational Social Science research community. For example, how many active users does the platform have? What percentage of accounts on the site are bots? And, what are the dominating topics and sub-topical spheres on the platform? In a globally coordinated effort of 80 scholars to shed light on these questions, and to offer a dataset that will equip other researchers to do the same, we have collected all 375 million tweets published within a 24-hour time period starting on September 21, 2022. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete 24-hour Twitter dataset that is available for the research community. With it, the present work aims to accomplish two goals. First, we seek to answer the aforementioned questions and provide descriptive metrics about Twitter that can serve as references for other researchers. Second, we create a baseline dataset for future research that can be used to study the potential impact of the platform's ownership change.

Hostility on Twitter in the Aftermath of Terror Attacks

“…Given that the terror attacks are exogenous events, such automated posting should, at worst, bias the attack effect toward zero. Yet, the problem of automatic activities might be stronger for more recent attacks, as the number of bots operating on Twitter has increased over time [22]. However, we do not observe differences in trends by year in our data.…”

“…At the time of data collection, the 1,192,909 users included in our sample had, on average, 8,028 followers, followed 1,230 users, and had a median of 8,435 posted Tweets. This implies that the users in our sample are somewhat more connected than the full 24-hour sample collected by [22] in September 2022. However, the distribution of these characteristics is skewed, especially concerning the number of followers.…”

“…Moreover, bots -by definition -are programmed to write content on an automated basis (e.g. at a specific hour; see [22]). Given that the terror attacks are exogenous events, such automated posting should, at worst, bias the attack effect toward zero.…”

The influence of Twitter hashtags in building supportive online communities for parents of children with special needs

“…So how can you use this to your advantage? If you use hashtags correctly, you can quickly let users know what your post is about, and if it's a topic that interests them, they will likely stop scrolling and read your post in more detail, and maybe even click on it (Pfeffer, Matter, Jaidka, Varol, Mashhadi, Lasser et al, 2023).…”

“…The unique features of the microblogging service Twitter, such as its character limit and the use of the hashtag, have contributed to its immense popularity. These features are likely to be the main reasons why Twitter has become so important in the dissemination of information and the promotion of lively dialogues (Pfeffer et al,2023). Hashtags play a crucial function in Twitter's internal organizing and classification; hence they see heavy use.…”