Network Analysis of Informal Social Media Conversations about Autism

Abstract

In today’s society, the use of social media has become a necessary daily activity. Social media is typically used for social interaction and access to news and information, and decision making. It is a valuable communication tool with others locally and worldwide, as well as to share, create, and spread information. Social media has greatly influenced many aspects of our society, particularly healthcare. Informal public speaking on social media, especially in Iran, has an influential role in the health community, such as consulting patients and their families together and sharing experiences related to symptoms, home remedies, and finding an experienced therapist or good treatment center. The virtual community of autistic patients and their families is a young but growing community. Ninisite, as the most crucial Iranian family social network, has had nearly 21.5M total visits last three Months. In this study, we first crawled the social network of interactive conversations related to autism from this forum. After preprocessing and data cleaning, the communication network between people was extracted. Then this network was studied by graph analysis methods. It was shown that this network with more than 800 members has solid and active hubs, although a fledgling and sparse network. We further showed that an auxiliary node that connects these hubs could make it much more substantial and play an essential role in managing the flow of information between the families of autistic patients.