关键词: 社交媒体, 水军, 情感社会网络, 群体行为

Abstract: Nowadays it can be observed that many companies getting involved in public events on the Internet generally employ public relations company to flood the Internet with purposeful articles or comments. Often hired by public relationship company, the online paid posters earn money by posting comments and articles in forum or social media. Their attempts can effectively impact on public opinions toward the involved companies. In China, these online paid posters are called water army. This paper defines the concepts of emotional social network and factions, and proposes a framework to discover the overlapping community from the emotional social network and detect factions in communities. This study collects comments in Weibo and constructs emotional social network based on the comments. Detecting communities and factions, this study can discover water army concealing in the social media.

Key words: social media, water army, emotional social network, group behavior