Patterns of implicit and non-follower retweet propagation: Investigating the role of applications and hashtags. Available online: http://journal.webscience.org/517/ (accessed on 1

Existing literature on retweets seems to focus mainly on retweets created using explicit, formal retweeting mecha-nisms, such as Twitter’s own native retweet function, and the prefixing of the terms ‘RT ’ or ‘via ’ in front of copied tweets. However, retweets can also be made using implicit, informal mechanisms. These include tweet replies and other mechanisms, which use neither the native nor RT/via mech-anisms, but their content and timelines suggest the likeli-hood of being a retweet. Moreover, retweets can also oc-cur with or without a defined follower/following network path between a tweet originator and a retweeter. This pa-per presents an initial taxonomy of propagation based on seven different ways a tweet may spread: native, native non-follower, RT/Via, RT/Via non-follower, replies, non-follower replies and other implicit ‘retweets’. An experi-ment has examined this new model, by investigating where tweets containing URLs from the domains of online peti-tions, charity fundraisers, news portals, and YouTube videos can be classified into the seven different categories. When including other implicit ‘retweets’, more than 50 % of all the retweets found across all four domains were classified as im-plicit retweets, while more than 79 % of all retweets were made by non-followers. More work needs to be done on the composition of other implicit ‘retweets’. Initial inves-tigations found hashtags in 99–100 % of these tweets, sug-gesting that retweeting using conventional mechanisms may not be the main method that URLs get propagated across microblogs