Structural Aspects of User Roles in Information Cascades.

Social media plays an important role for the exchange and dissemination of information among its users. In turn, online users shape social media by their interactions, status and online behaviour in general. These aspects differ massively from user to user, which has an impact on the outcome of information diffusion. Users on social media have been categorised to user roles according to their online behaviour. While there has been a lot of research on user roles and information diffusion in isolation, their combination has not been researched much. In this paper, we study their correlation in particular whether particular user roles occur in specific structural positions in information cascades. By testing several hypotheses we could confirm that there is indeed a correlation of these two aspects. However, some user roles demonstrate diverse behaviour with regard to their activity patterns and need further investigation.