Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter
HICSS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
Outtweeting the twitterers - predicting information cascades in microblogs
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
Want to be Retweeted? Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet in Twitter Network
SOCIALCOM '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on Social Computing
Who says what to whom on twitter
Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web
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Retweets are an important mechanism for recognising propagation of information on the Twitter social media platform. However, many retweets do not use the official retweet mechanism, or even community established conventions, and these "dark retweets" are not accounted for in many existing analysis. In this paper, a comprehensive matrix of tweet propagation is presented to show the different nuances of retweeting, based on seven characteristics: whether it is proprietary, the mechanism used, whether it is directed to followers or non-followers, whether it mentions other users, if it is explicitly propagating another tweet, if it links to an original tweet, and what is the audience it is pushed to. Based on this matrix and two assumptions of retweetability, the degrees of a retweet's "darkness" can be determined. This matrix was evaluated over 2.3 million tweets and it was found that dark retweets amounted to 12.86% (for search results less than 1500 tweets per URL) and 24.7% (for search results including more than 1500 tweets per URL) respectively. By extrapolating these results with those found in existing studies, potentially thousands of retweets may be hidden from existing studies on retweets.