The effect of social network size on hashtag adoption on Twitter

Monster, Iris; Lev-Ari, Shiri

doi:10.1111/cogs.12675

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

The effect of social network size on hashtag adoption on Twitter

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons103074

Lev-Ari, Shiri
Royal Holloway University of London;
Psychology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

Monster_LevAri_2018_Effect of social network size.pdf
(Publisher version), 123KB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Monster, I., & Lev-Ari, S. (2018). The effect of social network size on hashtag adoption on Twitter. Cognitive Science, 42(8), 3149-3158. doi:10.1111/cogs.12675.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-472B-F

Abstract

Propagation of novel linguistic terms is an important aspect of language use and language
change. Here, we test how social network size inﬂuences people’s likelihood of adopting novel
labels by examining hashtag use on Twitter. Speciﬁcally, we test whether following fewer Twitter
users leads to more varied and malleable hashtag use on Twitter , because each followed user is
ascribed greater weight and thus exerts greater inﬂuence on the following user. Focusing on Dutch
users tweeting about the terrorist attack in Brussels in 2016, we show that people who follow
fewer other users use a larger number of unique hashtags to refer to the event, reﬂecting greater
malleability and variability in use. These results have implications for theories of language learning, language use, and language change.