Real Friendship and Virtual Friendship: Differences in Similarity of Contents/People and Proposal of Classification Models on SNS

Abstract

When people anonymously use social network sites (SNSs) like Twitter, they may interact with not only real world friends but also strangers, who are not acquaintances in the real world. Therefore, both of real friendship (RF) and virtual friendship (VF) coexist in these SNSs. In this research, we investigated the differences in similarity of user pairs in Japan by their types of relationship, i.e. RF or VF. The primary results indicated that RF user pairs have more common follow users on SNSs than VF user pairs, and that contents posted by VF user pairs include more similar words than RF user pairs. It is implied that two users with RF have a similar interest in neighborhood users, and two users with VF are interested in similar topics. After that, we built the models to classify user pairs into RF or VF using the similarity measures. These models showed high performance to distinguish between RF and VF (their F-measures are larger than 0.80).