Characterising different communities of Twitter users: Migrants and natives

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter user behaviors and social network structures of migrants and natives, revealing distinct patterns in connections, activity levels, and nationality-based clustering, filling a research gap in migration-related social media analysis.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive comparison of migrants and natives on Twitter, highlighting differences in network connections, activity, and nationality-based clustering.

Findings

Migrants have more followers than friends.

Migrants tweet more than natives.

Users tend to connect based on nationality, especially migrants.

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.