Unfolding the event landscape on twitter: classification and exploration of user categories

Social media platforms such as Twitter garner significant attention from very large audiences in response to real-world events. Automatically establishing who is participating in information production or conversation around events can improve event content consumption, help expose the stakeholders in the event and their varied interests, and even help steer subsequent coverage of an event by journalists. In this paper, we take initial steps towards building an automatic classifier for user types on Twitter, focusing on three core user categories that are reflective of the information production and consumption processes around events: organizations, journalists/media bloggers, and ordinary individuals. Exploration of the user categories on a range of events shows distinctive characteristics in terms of the proportion of each user type, as well as differences in the nature of content each shared around the events.