A structural approach to detecting opinion leaders in Twitter by Random Matrix Theory

Social media is now one of the primary channels for consuming news. As a result, political figures and activists are increasingly using social media to push their interests. So, users who are influential in trends gain a lot of weight since they may change the narrative of the conversation. In this study, we employ random matrix theory to identify these influential users of Twitter in the 2021 Iranian presidential election. According to our research of trending hashtags, the most prominent people, in this case, were actually bots, showing the existence of coordinated and deceitful operations. Furthermore, we indicate which community has these leaders, implying that a specific community controls the trend of these hashtags. As a test case for our methodology, we use Twitter's popular hashtags for the Iranian presidential election in 2021.