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From “I Love You Babe” to “Leave Me Alone” - Romantic Relationship Breakups on Twitter

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8851))

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  • International Conference on Social Informatics

Abstract

We use public data from Twitter to study the breakups of the romantic relationships of 661 couples. Couples are identified through profile references such as @user1 writing “@user2 is the best boyfriend ever!!”. Using this data set we find evidence for a number of existing hypotheses describing psychological processes including (i) pre-relationship closeness being indicative of post-relationship closeness, (ii) “stonewalling”, i.e., ignoring messages by a partner, being indicative of a pending breakup, and (iii) post-breakup depression. We also observe a previously undocumented phenomenon of “batch un-friending and being un-friended” where users who break up experience sudden drops of 15-20 followers and friends.

Our work shows that public Twitter data can be used to gain new insights into psychological processes surrounding relationship dissolutions, something that most people go through at least once in their lifetime.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aalto University, Finland

    Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella

  2. Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

    Ingmar Weber

  3. University of Michigan, USA

    Sonya Dal Cin

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  1. Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella
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  2. Ingmar Weber
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  3. Sonya Dal Cin
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain

    Luca Maria Aiello

  2. Stanford Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, 94305-3096, Stanford, CA, USA

    Daniel McFarland

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Garimella, V.R.K., Weber, I., Dal Cin, S. (2014). From “I Love You Babe” to “Leave Me Alone” - Romantic Relationship Breakups on Twitter. In: Aiello, L.M., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8851. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13733-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13734-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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