Quantifying cross-platform engagement through large-scale user alignment

Abstract

As online social media becomes prevalent as part of our daily life, it is increasingly common for a user to have accounts on multiple social media platforms. In this work, we present our findings on quantifying the extent of user engagement of different platforms as well as their correlations. The study is conducted based on a large-scale user alignment on 6 major social media platforms. Specifically, we identify both explicit and implicit mentions of social media accounts from the Twitter Decahose stream over a period of 22 months. During the process, we have aligned a total of 21,456,808 Twitter users to their alternative accounts on different platforms. Subsequently, we extract the number of overlapping users between any combination of these social media platforms exhaustively.