Studies on friendships in online social networks involving geographic distance have so far relied on the city location provided in users' profiles. Consequently, most of the research on friendships have provided accuracy at the city level, at best, to designate a user's location. This study analyzes a Twitter dataset because it provides the exact geographic distance between corresponding users. We start by introducing a strong definition of "friend" on Twitter (i.e., a definition of bidirectional friendship), requiring bidirectional communication. Next, we utilize geo-tagged mentions delivered by users to determine their locations, where "@username" is contained anywhere in the body of tweets. To provide analysis results, we first introduce a friend counting algorithm. From the fact that Twitter users are likely to post consecutive tweets in the static mode, we also introduce a two-stage distance estimation algorithm. As the first of our main contributions, we verify that the number of friends of a particular Twitter user follows a well-known power-law distribution (i.e., a Zipf's distribution or a Pareto distribution). Our study also provides the following newly-discovered friendship degree related to the issue of space: The number of friends according to distance follows a double power-law (i.e., a double Pareto law) distribution, indicating that the probability of befriending a particular Twitter user is significantly reduced beyond a certain geographic distance between users, termed the separation point. Our analysis provides concrete evidence that Twitter can be a useful platform for assigning a more accurate scalar value to the degree of friendship between two users.
This study analyzes friendships in online social networks involving geographic distance with a geo-referenced Twitter dataset, which provides the exact distance between corresponding users. We start by introducing a strong definition of "friend" on Twitter, requiring bidirectional communication. Next, by utilizing geo-tagged mentions delivered by users to determine their locations, we introduce a two-stage distance estimation algorithm. As our main contribution, our study provides the following newly-discovered friendship degree related to the issue of space: The number of friends according to…
Due to the proliferation of online social networks (OSNs), users find themselves participating in multiple OSNs. These users leave their activity traces as they maintain friendships and interact with other users in these OSNs. In this work, we analyze how users maintain friendship in multiple OSNs by studying users who have accounts in both Twitter and Instagram. Specifically, we study the similarity of a user's friendship and the evenness of friendship distribution in multiple OSNs. Our study shows that most users in Twitter and Instagram prefer to maintain different friendships in the two OS…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its global popularity---can be dramatically different from how people see it in their social feeds---i.e., its perceived popularity---where the feeds aggregate their friends' posts. We trace the origin of this discrepancy to the friendship paradox in directed networks, which states that people are less popular than their friends (or followers) are, on average. …
Feld's friendship paradox states that "your friends have more friends than you, on average." This paradox arises because extremely popular people, despite being rare, are overrepresented when averaging over friends. Using a sample of the Twitter firehose, we confirm that the friendship paradox holds for >98% of Twitter users. Because of the directed nature of the follower graph on Twitter, we are further able to confirm more detailed forms of the friendship paradox: everyone you follow or who follows you has more friends and followers than you. This is likely caused by a correlation we demonst…
The friendship paradox is a sociological phenomenon stating that most people have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox refers to the same observation for attributes other than degree, and it has been observed in Twitter and scientific collaboration networks. This paper takes an analytical approach to model this phenomenon. We consider a preferential attachment-like network growth mechanism governed by both node degrees and `qualities'. We introduce measures to quantify paradoxes, and contrast the results obtained in our model to those obtained for an uncorrel…
The friendship paradox is the phenomenon that in social networks, people on average have fewer friends than their friends do. The generalized friendship paradox is an extension to attributes other than the number of friends. The friendship paradox and its generalized version have gathered recent attention due to the information they provide about network structure and local inequalities. In this paper, we propose several measures of nodal qualities which capture different aspects of their activities and influence in online social networks. Using these measures we analyse the prevalence of the …
Social networks (SNs) are increasingly important sources of news for many people. The online connections made by users allows information to spread more easily than traditional news media (e.g., newspaper, television). However, they also make the spread of fake news easier than in traditional media, especially through the users' social network connections. In this paper, we focus on investigating if the SNs' users connection structure can aid fake news detection on Twitter. In particular, we propose to embed users based on their follower or friendship networks on the Twitter platform, so as to…
An increasing number of people use wearables and other smart devices to quantify various health conditions, ranging from sleep patterns, to body weight, to heart rates. Of these Quantified Selfs many choose to openly share their data via online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. In this study, we use data for users who have chosen to connect their smart scales to Twitter, providing both a reliable time series of their body weight, as well as insights into their social surroundings and general online behavior. Concretely, we look at which social media features are predictive of physi…
User communities in social networks are usually identified by considering explicit structural social connections between users. While such communities can reveal important information about their members such as family or friendship ties and geographical proximity, they do not necessarily succeed at pulling like-minded users that share the same interests together. In this paper, we are interested in identifying communities of users that share similar topical interests over time, regardless of whether they are explicitly connected to each other on the social network. More specifically, we tackl…
Many societies are organized in networks that are formed by people who meet and interact over time. In this paper, we present a first model to capture the micro-foundations of social networks evolution, where boundedly rational agents of different types join the network; meet other agents stochastically over time; and consequently decide to form social ties. A basic premise of our model is that in real-world networks, agents form links by reasoning about the benefits that agents they meet over time can bestow. We study the evolution of the emerging networks in terms of friendship and popularit…
We study here the clustering of directed social graphs. The clustering coefficient has been introduced to capture the social phenomena that a friend of a friend tends to be my friend. This metric has been widely studied and has shown to be of great interest to describe the characteristics of a social graph. In fact, the clustering coefficient is adapted for a graph in which the links are undirected, such as friendship links (Facebook) or professional links (LinkedIn). For a graph in which links are directed from a source of information to a consumer of information, it is no more adequate. We s…
Mapping Social Media User Behaviors in Reciprocity Space
Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies, Kyoto University（京都大学计算与媒体研究学术中心）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology（丰桥技术科学大学计算机科学与工程系）；Institute of Business Sciences, University of Tsukuba（筑波大学商业科学研究所）
While there has been much work examining the affects of social network structure on innovation adoption, models to date have lacked important features such as meta-populations reflecting real geography or influence from mass media forces. In this article, we show these are features crucial to producing more accurate predictions of a social contagion and technology adoption at the city level. Using data from the adoption of the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter, we present a model of adoption on a network that places friendships in real geographic space and exposes individuals to mass me…
Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；Center for Data Science, New York University（纽约大学数据科学中心）；Wageningen University（瓦赫宁根大学）
Most individuals in social networks experience a so-called Friendship Paradox: they are less popular than their friends on average. This effect may explain recent findings that widespread social network media use leads to reduced happiness. However the relation between popularity and happiness is poorly understood. A Friendship paradox does not necessarily imply a Happiness paradox where most individuals are less happy than their friends. Here we report the first direct observation of a significant Happiness Paradox in a large-scale online social network of $39,110$ Twitter users. Our results …
A social network grows over a period of time with the formation of new connections and relations. In recent years we have witnessed a massive growth of online social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. So it has become a problem of extreme importance to know the destiny of these networks. Thus predicting the evolution of a social network is a question of extreme importance. A good model for evolution of a social network can help in understanding the properties responsible for the changes occurring in a network structure. In this paper we propose such a model for evolution of social networks. …
Online social networking (OSN) has become of great influence to Filipinos, where Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram are among the popular ones. Their popularity, coupled with their intuitive and interactive use, allow one's personal information such as gender, age, address, relationship status, and list of friends to become publicly available. The accessibility of information from these sites allow, with the aid of computers, for the study of a wide population's characteristics even in a provincial scale. Aside from being neighbouring locales, the respective residents of Lagun…
Existing rumor detection strategies typically provide detection labels while ignoring their explanation. Nonetheless, providing pieces of evidence to explain why a suspicious tweet is rumor is essential. As such, a novel model, LOSIRD, was proposed in this paper. First, LOSIRD mines appropriate evidence sentences and classifies them by automatically checking the veracity of the relationship of the given claim and its evidence from about 5 million Wikipedia documents. LOSIRD then automatically constructs two heterogeneous graph objects to simulate the propagation layout of the tweets and code t…
Social-media data provides increasing opportunities for automated analysis of large sets of textual documents. So far, automated tools have been developed to account for either the social networks between the participants of the debates, or to analyze the content of those debates. Less attention has been paid to mapping co-occurring actors (participants) and topics (content) in online debates that form socio-semantic networks. We propose a new, automated approach that uses a whole matrix approach of co-addressed topics and the actors. We show the advantages of the new approach with the analysi…
Veracity of data posted on the microblog platforms has in recent years been a subject of intensive study by professionals specializing in various fields of informatics as well as sociology, particularly in the light of increasing importance of online tools for news spreading. On Twitter and similar sites, it is possible to report on ongoing situations globally with minimal delay, while the cost of such reporting remains negligible. One of the most important features of this social network is that content delivery can be customized to allow users to focus only on news items covering subject mat…
Online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have gained tremendous popularity for information exchange. The availability of unprecedented amounts of digital data has accelerated research on information diffusion in online social networks. However, the mechanism of information spreading in online social networks remains elusive due to the complexity of social interactions and rapid change of online social networks. Much of prior work on information diffusion over online social networks has based on empirical and statistical approaches. The majority of dynamical models arising from infor…
Daily interactions naturally define social circles. Individuals tend to be friends with the people they spend time with and they choose to spend time with their friends, inextricably entangling physical location and social relationships. As a result, it is possible to predict not only someone's location from their friends' locations but also friendship from spatial and temporal co-occurrence. While several models have been developed to separately describe mobility and the evolution of social networks, there is a lack of studies coupling social interactions and mobility. In this work, we introd…
On-line social networks, such as in Facebook and Twitter, are often studied from the perspective of friendship ties between agents in the network. Adversarial ties, however, also play an important role in the structure and function of social networks, but are often hidden. Underlying generative mechanisms of social networks are predicted by structural balance theory, which postulates that triads of agents, prefer to be transitive, where friends of friends are more likely friends, or anti-transitive, where adversaries of adversaries become friends. The previously proposed Iterated Local Transit…
Many real-world networks are intrinsically directed. Such networks include activation of genes, hyperlinks on the internet, and the network of followers on Twitter among many others. The challenge, however, is to create a network model that has many of the properties of real-world networks such as powerlaw degree distributions and the small-world property. To meet these challenges, we introduce the \textit{Directed} Random Geometric Graph (DRGG) model, which is an extension of the random geometric graph model. We prove that it is scale-free with respect to the indegree distribution, has binomi…
