Source-linked AI summary
Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, Fang Wu
TL;DR
The paper addresses the gap between declared social-network links and actual interaction, where users communicate with only a few contacts. It analyzes Twitter posts, declared links, and repeated direct messages to identify users' actual friends. The results show that this sparse hidden network, rather than the dense declared network, better tracks usage and is more relevant to information spread.
Problem
Declared social-network links do not necessarily represent actual interactions because users interact with only a few listed contacts.
Method
The study analyzes 309,740 Twitter users and defines a friend as someone receiving at least two directed posts from a user.
Results
The average friend-to-followee ratio is 0.13 and the median is 0.04, indicating that users communicate with a small fraction of their declared followees.
Takeaways & Limitations
The sparse network of actual friends is more influential in driving Twitter usage and is the network that matters for studying word-of-mouth spread.
Takeaways & Limitations
Twitter displays only up to 3201 updates per user, although the data provide the complete update set for about 99.6% of users.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the declared set of friends and followers.
Abstract
Twitter's declared follower and followee links substantially overstate users' actual interactions. Direct communication reveals a sparse network of friends that better tracks activity and matters for understanding information spread.
- Data and operationalization: 309,740 users were analyzed using declared followers, followees, posts, and timestamps; 211,024 users had posted at least twice.Active users averaged 206 days between their first and last posts.
- Data and operationalization: A Twitter friend is defined as someone to whom a user directed at least two posts.This operationalization measures repeated direct communication rather than declared links.
- Activity and network structure: Posts increase with both followers and friends, but follower-based activity saturates whereas friend-based activity rises to 3201 updates.The number of friends is therefore a more accurate signal of user activity than the number of followers.
- Activity and network structure: The average friend-to-followee ratio is 0.13 and the median is 0.04, showing that users communicate with only a small fraction of declared followees.Most users have δ below .1, while 98.8% have fewer friends than followees.
- Activity and network structure: Friends eventually saturate as followees grow because adding a followee requires minimal effort compared with maintaining direct communication.The declared network can keep expanding while the interaction network remains nearly constant.
- Implications: Twitter contains a dense declared network and a sparser hidden network of actual friends, with the latter more influential in driving usage and word-of-mouth spread.Many declared links are meaningless from an interaction perspective.