Why is the bird (re)tweeting? : Creating a simulation of retweeting behaviour on Twitter

Social media is a big part of today’s society. But how do we know where the information we put out on the internet end up? This bachelor thesis is part of a bigger project where first year students at the cognitive science program at Linköping University will be taught about modeling of a social phenomenon. A lot can be learned about a phenomenon through modeling and simulation and that was the motivation for this bachelor thesis – to try to make a simulation of the spreading of information on social media. The social media platform that was selected was Twitter and the information spreading was narrowed down to retweeting of a tweet. The simulation was implemented in NetLogo – a modeling and simulation program. The simulation was based on important factors that contribute to a person’s willingness to retweet. The factors were found in published research reports. The result was a simulation of retweeting on Twitter that in some aspects resemble the real world phenomenon as it is depicted in published research reports. Towards the end of the report there is a discussion about what factors contributed to the resemblance or the difference between the world depicted in the published research reports and the simulation