Book Chapter

Characterising different communities of Twitter users: migrants and natives

Kim, J., Sîrbu, A., Rossetti, G., Giannotti, F.
In: Benito, R. M., Cherifi, C., Cherifi, H., Moro, E., Rocha, L. M., Sales-Pardo, M. (Eds.): Complex networks and their applications X: Volume 1, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021, 130–141
Studies in computational intelligence 1015
Cham, Springer (2022)
Open Access

Abstract

Today, many users are actively using Twitter to express their opinions and to share information. Thanks to the availability of the data, researchers have studied behaviours and social networks of these users. International migration studies have also benefited from this social media platform to improve migration statistics. Although diverse types of social networks have been studied so far on Twitter, social networks of migrants and natives have not been studied before. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying characteristics and behaviours of migrants and natives on Twitter. To do so, we perform a general assessment of features including profiles and tweets, and an extensive network analysis on the network. We find that migrants have more followers than friends. They have also tweeted more despite that both of the groups have similar account ages. More interestingly, the assortativity scores showed that users tend to connect based on nationality more than country of residence, and this is more the case for migrants than natives. Furthermore, both natives and migrants tend to connect mostly with natives.

Keywords: World, computational social science, international migration, social network
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.