A Large-Scale Community Structure Analysis In Facebook

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the community structure of Facebook at a large scale, revealing patterns of social interactions and organization among millions of users, providing insights into online social dynamics.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale mesoscopic analysis of Facebook's community structure, unveiling new social organization patterns and methodological approaches.

Findings

Identification of specific community organization patterns

Insights into social interaction tendencies in online networks

Analysis of sampling and clustering effects on community detection

Abstract

Understanding social dynamics that govern human phenomena, such as communications and social relationships is a major problem in current computational social sciences. In particular, given the unprecedented success of online social networks (OSNs), in this paper we are concerned with the analysis of aggregation patterns and social dynamics occurring among users of the largest OSN as the date: Facebook. In detail, we discuss the mesoscopic features of the community structure of this network, considering the perspective of the communities, which has not yet been studied on such a large scale. To this purpose, we acquired a sample of this network containing millions of users and their social relationships; then, we unveiled the communities representing the aggregation units among which users gather and interact; finally, we analyzed the statistical features of such a network of communities, discovering and characterizing some specific organization patterns followed by individuals interacting in online social networks, that emerge considering different sampling techniques and clustering methodologies. This study provides some clues of the tendency of individuals to establish social interactions in online social networks that eventually contribute to building a well-connected social structure, and opens space for further social studies.