Exploring social media network landscape of post-Soviet space
Autor: | Alexander Veremyev, Alexander Semenov, Eduardo L. Pasiliao, Vladimir Boginski, Alexander G. Nikolaev, Jari Veijalainen, Alexander V. Mantzaris |
---|---|
Jazyk: | angličtina |
Rok vydání: | 2019 |
Předmět: |
General Computer Science
Population sosiaalinen media Context (language use) 010501 environmental sciences Space (commercial competition) 01 natural sciences Empirical research big data 0502 economics and business Social network services General Materials Science Social media Economic geography education sovellukset (tietotekniikka) 0105 earth and related environmental sciences ta113 verkostot education.field_of_study Modularity (networks) big data applications Data collection 05 social sciences General Engineering network theory (graphs) Scale (social sciences) lcsh:Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering social network services lcsh:TK1-9971 050203 business & management |
Zdroj: | IEEE Access, Vol 7, Pp 411-426 (2019) |
Popis: | The “post-Soviet space” consists of countries with a substantial fraction of the world’s population; however, unlike many other regions, its social media network landscape is still somewhat under-explored. This paper aims at filling this gap. To this purpose, we use anonymized data on user friendships at VK.com (also known as VKontakte and, informally, as “Russian Facebook”), which is the largest and most popular social media portal in the post-Soviet space with hundreds of millions of user accounts. Using the VK network snapshots from October 2015 to December 2016, we conduct a “multiscale” empirical study of this network by considering connections among individual users, cities, and countries. Our findings indicate that the VK users form a small-world network with basic characteristics consistent with Facebook and other social media networks. In addition, the analysis of modularity-based communities within the user scale network reveals a pattern of geographical separation of the identified communities mostly along the borders between countries. However, the comparison of the two network snapshots suggests that some of these communities may be “blending” within the network, whereas other communities remain “self-contained.” Furthermore, the analysis of city scale and country scale networks identifies cities and countries that are most “central” (in the context of certain metrics) in the VK network. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
Externí odkaz: |