Equality and Social Mobility in Twitter Discussion Groups

Online groups, including chat groups and forums, are becoming important avenues for gathering and exchanging information ranging from troubleshooting devices, to sharing experiences, to finding medical information and advice. Thus, issues about the health and stability of these groups are of particular interest to both industry and academia. In this paper we conduct a large scale study with the objectives of first, characterizing essential aspects of the interactions between the participants of such groups and second, characterizing how the nature of these interactions relate to the health of the groups. Specifically, we concentrate on Twitter Discussion Groups (TDGs), self-organized groups that meet on Twitter by agreeing on a hashtag, date and time. These groups have repeated, real-time meetings and are a rising phenomenon on Twitter. We examine the interactions in these groups in terms of the social equality and mobility of the exchange of attention between participants, according to the @mention convention on Twitter. We estimate the health of a group by measuring the retention rate of participants and the change in the number of meetings over time. We find that social equality and mobility are correlated, and that equality and mobility are related to a group's health. In fact, equality and mobility are as predictive of a group's health as some prior characteristics used to predict health of other online groups. Our findings are based on studying 100 thousand sessions of over two thousand discussion groups over the period of June 2012 to June 2013. These finding are not only relevant to stakeholders interested in maintaining these groups, but to researchers and academics interested in understanding the behavior of participants in online discussions. We also find the parallel with findings on the relationship between economic mobility and equality and health indicators in real-world nations striking and thought-provoking.