Today, many users are actively using Twitter to express their opinions and to share information. Thanks to the availability of the data, researchers have studied behaviours and social networks of these users. International migration studies have also benefited from this social media platform to improve migration statistics. Although diverse types of social networks have been studied so far on Twitter, social networks of migrants and natives have not been studied before. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying characteristics and behaviours of migrants and natives on Twitter. To do so, we perform a general assessment of features including profiles and tweets, and an extensive network analysis on the network. We find that migrants have more followers than friends. They have also tweeted more despite that both of the groups have similar account ages. More interestingly, the assortativity scores showed that users tend to connect based on nationality more than country of residence, and this is more the case for migrants than natives. Furthermore, both natives and migrants tend to connect mostly with natives.

Characterising Different Communities of Twitter Users : Migrants and Natives

Giannotti, Fosca
2022

Abstract

Today, many users are actively using Twitter to express their opinions and to share information. Thanks to the availability of the data, researchers have studied behaviours and social networks of these users. International migration studies have also benefited from this social media platform to improve migration statistics. Although diverse types of social networks have been studied so far on Twitter, social networks of migrants and natives have not been studied before. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying characteristics and behaviours of migrants and natives on Twitter. To do so, we perform a general assessment of features including profiles and tweets, and an extensive network analysis on the network. We find that migrants have more followers than friends. They have also tweeted more despite that both of the groups have similar account ages. More interestingly, the assortativity scores showed that users tend to connect based on nationality more than country of residence, and this is more the case for migrants than natives. Furthermore, both natives and migrants tend to connect mostly with natives.
2022
Settore INF/01 - Informatica
COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021 : the 10th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications,
Madrid
November 30 - December 2, 2021
Complex Networks & Their Applications X
Springer
978-3-030-93409-5
Big data; Communities; International migration; Social network analysis; Twitter
   SoBigData++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics
   SoBigData-PlusPlus
   European Commission
   Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
   871042

   Enhanced migration measures from a multidimensional perspective
   HumMingBird
   European Commission
   Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
   870661
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11384/137131
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