GalaxyScope – Finding the “Truth of Tribes” on Social Media

This paper introduces GalaxyScope, a novel system to distinguish different interpretations of “truth” for different virtual tribes. It extracts the tribes from Wikipedia through analyzing its categories “Ideologies”, “Lifestyles”, and “Culture”, leading to tribes such as “capitalism”, “socialism”, and “liberalism”. It then calculates the most influential “tribe leaders” through their association on Wikipedia with these concepts. To score their influence in Wikipedia, we use a novel metric we call “reach2” which measures how many people somebody can reach within two degrees of separation on Wikipedia living people pages. It subsequently calculates the vocabulary on Twitter of the tribe leaders, and uses these words to automatically assign individuals to tribes, as well as calculating the relevance of text documents such as tweets or news items for each tribe.