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Existence of outsiders as a characteristic of online communication networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2018

TARO TAKAGUCHI ,
TAKANORI MAEHARA ,
KEN-ICHI KAWARABAYASHI  and
MASASHI TOYODA
TARO TAKAGUCHI
Affiliation:
National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan (e-mail: taro.takaguchi.cp@gmail.com, takanori.maehara@riken.jp, k_kenti@nii.ac.jp) JST, ERATO, Kawarabayashi Large Graph Project, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan
TAKANORI MAEHARA
Affiliation:
National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan (e-mail: taro.takaguchi.cp@gmail.com, takanori.maehara@riken.jp, k_kenti@nii.ac.jp) JST, ERATO, Kawarabayashi Large Graph Project, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan
KEN-ICHI KAWARABAYASHI
Affiliation:
National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan (e-mail: taro.takaguchi.cp@gmail.com, takanori.maehara@riken.jp, k_kenti@nii.ac.jp) JST, ERATO, Kawarabayashi Large Graph Project, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan
MASASHI TOYODA
Affiliation:
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan (e-mail: toyoda@tkl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
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Abstract

Online social networking services involve communication activities between large number of individuals over the public Internet and their crawled records are often regarded as proxies of real (i.e., offline) interaction structure. However, structure observed in these records might differ from real counterparts because individuals may behave differently online and non-human accounts may even participate. To understand the difference between online and real social networks, we investigate an empirical communication network between users on Twitter, which is perhaps one of the largest social networking services. We define a network of user pairs that send reciprocal messages. Based on the correlation between degree of adjacent nodes observed in this network, we hypothesize that this network differs from conventional understandings in the sense that there is a small number of distinctive users that we call outsiders. Outsiders do not belong to any user groups but they are connected with different groups, while not being well connected with each other. We identify outsiders by maximizing the degree assortativity coefficient of the network via node removal, thereby confirming that local structural properties of outsiders identified are consistent with our hypothesis. Our findings suggest that the existence of outsiders should be considered when using Twitter communication networks for social network analysis.

Keywords

online social networksdata analysisassortative mixing
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 431 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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