Temporal and Content Coupling Analysis of Social Media User Behavior
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 ; and at the microscale, within-session action counts and inter-action intervals follow exponential distributions with and , 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