Geographic Dissection of the Twitter Network

Abstract

Geography plays an important role in shaping societal interactions in the offline world. However, as more and more social interactions occur online via social net- working sites like Twitter and Facebook, users can in- teract with others unconstrained by their geolocations, raising the question: does offline geography still matter in online social networks? In this paper, we attempt to address this question by dissecting the Twitter so- cial network based on users’ geolocations and investi- gating how users’ geolocation impacts their participa- tion in Twitter, including their connections to others and the information they exchange with them. Our in-depth analysis reveals that geography continues to have a sig- nificant impact on user interactions in the Twitter social network. The influence of geography could be poten- tially explained by the shared national, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds of users from the same geographic neighborhood.