Geographies of an online social network : weak distance decay effect and strong spatial modularity

Lengyel, Balázs and Varga, Attila and Ságvári, Bence and Jakobi, Ákos and Kertész, János (2014) Geographies of an online social network : weak distance decay effect and strong spatial modularity. PLOS ONE. ISSN 1932-6203 (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that geographical distance had a diminishing role on telecommunication ties and has claimed that communities were bounded to physical, social, and cultural environments. In order to demonstrate that the above statements are valid for online social networks (OSN), the complete network of a major Hungarian OSN is analyzed. First, we construct a gravity model that suggests a weaker effect of distance than previously found in phone-call networks. In a next step, we construct a network in which towns are nodes and introduce two alternatives of tie weights. The Louvain community detection method implies that network modules are very stable and spatially-based. Furthermore, communities after normalization of network edges by using a methodology frequently applied in social science reflect the administrative regions of the country with a surprisingly high precision.

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