The structural effects of sharing function on Twitter networks: Focusing on the retweet function

Abstract

Social network services (SNSs) provide the functions for both the management of social networks and information diffusion. We considered SNS networks as the networks that embrace both the strong links formed through the making-relationship function and the weak links formed through the sharing function. For identifying the structural role of each link, we constructed the SNS networks using Twitter data and analysed them focusing not on nodes but on links of the networks at a component level and at an ego-network level. More than 200,000 tweets were randomly sampled through the streaming API of Twitter. As a result, we found that weak links formed through the sharing function play a more important role in maintaining the range of information diffusion and provide more structural advantage in acquiring and controlling information than the strong links formed through the making-relationship function.