Most social network analysis works at the level of interactions between users. But the vast growth in size and complexity of social networks enables us to examine interactions at larger scale. In this work we use a dataset of 76M submissions to the social network Reddit, which is organized into distinct sub-communities called subreddits. We measure the similarity between entire subreddits both in terms of user similarity and topical similarity. Our goal is to find community pairs with similar userbases, but dissimilar content; we refer to this type of relationship as a "latent interest." Detection of latent interests not only provides a perspective on individual users as they shift between roles (student, sports fan, political activist) but also gives insight into the dynamics of Reddit as a whole. Latent interest detection also has potential applications for recommendation systems and for researchers examining community evolution.
While we are aware of no work that multiple definitions of similarity to detect new types of relationships, previous work has explored the interplay of topic and social structure. For instance, in @cite_13 , the authors examine the capacity of Twitter hashtags to predict underlying social structures. In a similar vein, @cite_25 explore the extent to which Twitter acts as a news source and, separately, as a social network. Also, @cite_2 explore clustering through content and social structures using social tags on Instagram.
@cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_2
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People's interests and people's social relationships are intuitively connected, but understanding their interplay and whether they can help predict each other has remained an open question. We examine the interface of two decisive structures forming the backbone of online social media: the graph structure of social networks - who connects with whom - and the set structure of topical affiliations - who is interested in what. In studying this interface, we identify key relationships whereby each of these structures can be understood in terms of the other. The context for our analysis is Twitter, a complex social network of both follower relationships and communication relationships. On Twitter, "hashtags" are used to label conversation topics, and we examine hashtag usage alongside these social structures. We find that the hashtags that users adopt can predict their social relationships, and also that the social relationships between the initial adopters of a hashtag can predict the future popularity of that hashtag. By studying weighted social relationships, we observe that while strong reciprocated ties are the easiest to predict from hashtag structure, they are also much less useful than weak directed ties for predicting hashtag popularity. Importantly, we show that computationally simple structural determinants can provide remarkable performance in both tasks. While our analyses focus on Twitter, we view our findings as broadly applicable to topical affiliations and social relationships in a host of diverse contexts, including the movies people watch, the brands people like, or the locations people frequent. With over 300 million active users, Twitter is among the largest online news and social networking services in existence today. Open access to information on Twitter makes it a valuable source of data for research on social interactions, sentiment analysis, content diffusion, link prediction, and the dynamics behind human collective behaviour in general. Here we use Twitter data to construct co-occurrence language networks based on hashtags and based on all the words in tweets, and we use these networks to study link prediction by means of different methods and evaluation metrics. In addition to using five known methods, we propose two effective weighted similarity measures, and we compare the obtained outcomes in dependence on the selected semantic context of topics on Twitter. We find that hashtag networks yield to a large degree equal results as all-word networks, thus supporting the claim that hashtags alone robustly capture the semantic context of tweets, and as such are useful and suitable for studying the content and categorization. We also introduce ranking diagrams as an efficient tool for the comparison of the performance of different link prediction algorithms across multiple datasets. Our research indicates that successful link prediction algorithms work well in correctly foretelling highly probable links even if the information about a network structure is incomplete, and they do so even if the semantic context is rationalized to hashtags. We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female male binary; we argue for a more nuanced approach. By clustering Twitter users, we find a natural decomposition of the dataset into various styles and topical interests. Many clusters have strong gender orientations, but their use of linguistic resources sometimes directly conflicts with the population-level language statistics. We view these clusters as a more accurate reflection of the multifaceted nature of gendered language styles. Previous corpus-based work has also had little to say about individuals whose linguistic styles defy population-level gender patterns. To identify such individuals, we train a statistical classifier, and measure the classifier confidence for each individual in the dataset. Examining individuals whose language does not match the classifier's model for their gender, we find that they have social networks that include significantly fewer same-gender social connections and that, in general, social network homophily is correlated with the use of same-gender language markers. Pairing computational methods and social theory thus offers a new perspective on how gender emerges as individuals position themselves relative to audiences, topics, and mainstream gender norms. There is a widespread intuitive sense that different kinds of information spread differently on-line, but it has been difficult to evaluate this question quantitatively since it requires a setting where many different kinds of information spread in a shared environment. Here we study this issue on Twitter, analyzing the ways in which tokens known as hashtags spread on a network defined by the interactions among Twitter users. We find significant variation in the ways that widely-used hashtags on different topics spread. Our results show that this variation is not attributable simply to differences in "stickiness," the probability of adoption based on one or more exposures, but also to a quantity that could be viewed as a kind of "persistence" - the relative extent to which repeated exposures to a hashtag continue to have significant marginal effects. We find that hashtags on politically controversial topics are particularly persistent, with repeated exposures continuing to have unusually large marginal effects on adoption; this provides, to our knowledge, the first large-scale validation of the "complex contagion" principle from sociology, which posits that repeated exposures to an idea are particularly crucial when the idea is in some way controversial or contentious. Among other findings, we discover that hashtags representing the natural analogues of Twitter idioms and neologisms are particularly non-persistent, with the effect of multiple exposures decaying rapidly relative to the first exposure. We also study the subgraph structure of the initial adopters for different widely-adopted hashtags, again finding structural differences across topics. We develop simulation-based and generative models to analyze how the adoption dynamics interact with the network structure of the early adopters on which a hashtag spreads.