Multirelational Organization of Large-scale Social Networks in an Online World

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large-scale, multi-relational online social network, revealing how different types of social interactions interrelate and confirming the structural balance theory in a real-world digital environment.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of multi-relational social networks at scale, examining positive and negative interactions and their interdependence.

Findings

Negative interactions show lower reciprocity and weaker clustering.

Different social roles are played in different network types.

Empirical verification of structural balance theory in a large-scale online network.

Abstract

The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be seen as a non-linear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks, where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social interactions, however, the multi-dimensional nature of these interactions has largely been ignored in empirical studies, mostly because of lack of data. Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multi-relational, large social network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering and fatter-tail degree distribution. We then proceed to explore how the inter-dependence of different network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach we present the first empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity relations.