Statistical Physics of Twitter users' interactions*

In 1957 Jaynes proposed an Information Theory approach to derive the statistical ensembles of Statistical Mechanics [1]: the maximisation of the Shannon entropy, after constraining the energy of the system returns exactly the probability distributions of the canonical ensemble. Recently, the same approach was extended to the study of complex networks [2-4] and, when applied to the study of the political debate on Online Social Networks (OSN), it permits to infer several non-trivial information, as the political orientation of the users, the effective flow of messages and the presence of (dis)information strategies [5-7]. In the present seminar I will review the definition of such framework and show the details of the various applications on the political debate on Twitter.

[1] Jaynes E. T., Phys Rev (1957)
[2] Park, J. & Newman, M. E. J., Phys. Rev. E (2004).
[3] Squartini T. & Garlaschelli D., Springer, page 116, (2017)
[4] Cimini, G., Squartini, T., Saracco, F., Garlaschelli, D., Gabrielli, A. and Caldarelli, G, Nat. Rev. Phys. (2019)
[5] Becatti, C., Caldarelli, G., Lambiotte, R. & Saracco, F., Palgrave Commun. (2019).
[6] Caldarelli, G., De Nicola, R., Del Vigna, F. Petrocchi, M. & Saracco, F. Commun Phys 3, 81 (2020)
[7] Caldarelli, G., De Nicola, R., Petrocchi, M., Pratelli, M., and Saracco, F., arXiv:2010.01913