Figure 1.
Social bursts of collective attention during exceptional events. (A) Volume of activity in tweets/minute (y-axis) as a function of time (x-axis, measured in hours) observed in the microblogging platform Twitter and measured during special events (Pope Francis’ election in 2013, the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016, the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech in 2013). (B) Bursts decay either instantaneously (top) or with some characteristic relaxation dynamics (bottom). The collective activity shown here aggregates the number of messages and the social actions they trigger: N(t) + Rretweets(t) + Rreplies(t).