Figure 2

An illustration of users’ hashtag usage stream and the corresponding collective attention shift network. For each user, we extracted all pairs of distinct hashtags that were used in successive tweets (including retweets) in the user’s timeline as node pairs with edges pointing to the more recently used hashtags. An attention graph is constructed by integrating all nodes and edges from all users, with edge weights representing the number of distinct users whose attention shifted from one hashtag to another.