WWW2026

Lurkers, Interactors, Creators: Modeling Behavioral and Ideological Diversity on X

Cai Yang, Kokil Jaidka, Yphtach Lelkes, Subhayan Mukerjee

摘要

User behavior on social media---from scrolling and viewing to liking, reposting, and posting---yet most research relies on self-reports that obscure fine-grained usage patterns. We analyze high-resolution activity logs from 209 U.S. X (Twitter) users tracked over four weeks to identify distinct behavioral profiles based on session-level features. Latent profile analysis reveals three groups---interactors (32.52%), lurkers (60.45%), and creators (7.03%) that differ in engagement intensity, demographics, and content exposure. Interactors and lurkers skew younger and Democratic, whereas creators skew older and more Republican, consuming more ideological and low-credibility content. These results link behavioral heterogeneity to systematically different information environments and suggest that platform interventions may operate unevenly across user types. Our findings demonstrate the value of log-based behavioral segmentation for understanding online participation and motivate profile-aware platform governance and content moderation strategies.