Credibility-Based Twitter Social Network Analysis

Social Network (SN) members in Twitter communicate in varied contexts such as crisis. Formations within social networks are unique as some members have more influence over other members; members with more influence are known as leaders or pioneers. Finding leaders in a social network is the central factor in information dissemination; therefore, the main objective of this paper is to utilize social network information to identify leaders in Twitter during crisis situations. We propose a new approach to identify social network leaders based on their credibility which is drawn from their trustworthiness and expertise utilizing the “Follow the Leader” model based on the content quality generated by SN members. Our approach is highly innovative and the empirical results demonstrate that our approach can identify SN community leaders in a specific context (crisis) and has significant practical benefits.