Strength of Nations: A Case Study on Estimating the Influence of Leading Countries Using Social Media Analysis.

The use of social media has become pervasive for social networking and content sharing. Every day, thousands of news articles are written about events occurring around the world. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites is so massive that a large proportion of the data remains largely neglected. Similar to how users augment their influence by sharing content, online published mass-media can model the flow of influence between countries. Our work bridges the gap between political and economic analysis, by relying on social media to understand key aspects of relationships between countries in various contexts of interest. We use five datasets of influential countries, combined with seven hot topics in news, and use Event Registry as a data mining tool; out of the gathered data we further build directed weighted graphs. Based on the topological structures, we introduce four different node strength measures and showcase different snapshots of influence between countries.