Human behaviour in different social medias: A case study of Twitter and Disqus

Abstract

Contemporary modern world has witnessed the widespread emergence of online social media and similar technologies. Peoples' behaviour over different social network platform has become an interesting topic of research. In this study, we investigate whether people express analogous identity over different platforms and analysis of different social platform usage contributes to reveal more of a person. We analyse people's usage pattern in two major online platforms, the most widely used social media platform Twitter and a major online commenting platform Disqus. We extract linguistic features and infer personality traits from both of these platforms. Our study reveals differential relationship between personality traits and Disqus and Twitter usage. We also find that social media has an influence on a person's discussion topic. People share opinion on varieties of topics and entities exclusively in Twitter and Disqus. Moreover Disqus provides stronger assessment of a person's sentiment over a topic or entity. Combination of these two profiles gives an extensive view of a user's interest and sensitivity which justify the inference that people use different social network for different purposes and single social network analysis is not enough to build a comprehensive virtual identity of a person.