Investigating Conversation Connectivity in Politically- and Socially-Charged Twitter Discussions

Twitter has frequently served as a platform for political and social discussion, playing a notable role in organizing protests, serving as a form of civil disobedience, and being used as a means of expressing outrage over social events. We seek to further research aspects of Twitter conversations (specifically their use of Twitter hashtags), which allow them to remain connected and bring together individuals and groups with differing opinions. Our hope is that, by finding these characteristics of Twitter hashtags, we can further elucidate methods of sustaining debate and discussion around political and social movements as well as bridging various communities of thought. We focus specifically on the Twitter conversations related to the August 2014 shooting of 18-year old Michael Brown, which have been centered on the hashtag #ferguson. We generate both undirected graphs and multigraphs to represent this Twitter conversation using co-occurring hashtags. We run two experiments on our graphs in order to investigate the effect on connectivity of node influence, edge presence and frequency, as well as node presence and