English

Temporal and Content Coupling Analysis of Social Media User Behavior

Social and Information Networks 2026-05-01 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

News consumption behavior is shaped by the coupling between temporal dynamics and content selection. This study proposes a multi-scale temporal-content framework and validates it on two large real-world news datasets, MIND and Adressa. Results reveal hierarchical temporal patterns. At the macroscale, Fourier modeling identifies clear circadian rhythms; at the mesoscale, session intervals follow a power-law distribution with α1\alpha \approx 1; and at the microscale, within-session action counts and inter-action intervals follow exponential distributions with λ0.3\lambda \approx 0.3 and λ0.02\lambda \approx 0.02, respectively. Content analysis shows that clicks are mainly driven by historical interests, while this dependence weakens as content diversity increases. Temporal-content coupling further indicates that users' historical interests dominate active time periods in shaping behavior. Preference groups also differ: timeliness and entertainment-oriented users click more frequently and rely more on historical interests, whereas diversified users click less and are more sensitive to content diversity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.27530,
  title  = {Temporal and Content Coupling Analysis of Social Media User Behavior},
  author = {Jipeng Tan and Mengye Yang and Zhanghao Li and Yong Min},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.27530},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 9 figures, submitting to the Journal of Computer Information Systems