Leveraging Content Producer Networks and User Perception to Detect Online Discursive Communities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a community-detection framework that leverages the asymmetry between content producers and consumers to identify online discursive communities, validated on Italian political debates on Twitter/X.

Contribution

The study presents a novel approach that clusters key users based on their interactions and audience overlap, improving community detection accuracy over standard methods.

Findings

More coherent communities aligned with political structures

Leader-based clustering outperforms activity-based criteria

Framework is adaptable to various online platforms

Abstract

Online discussions are often characterized by strong behavioral asymmetries: a relatively small fraction of users actively produces content, while the majority primarily consumes and redistributes it. Here we propose a community-detection framework for online social networks that exploits this asymmetry by first identifying and clustering a set of leading users, and then extending the resulting labels to the broader user base. We introduce two complementary strategies to cluster leaders, one based on their mutual interactions and the other on audience overlap, both relying on entropy-based filtering to separate signal from noise. We evaluate the framework on three major Italian political debates on Twitter/X, using public figures--identified through the pre-2022 verification system--as leaders, and known affiliations of political actors as ground truth labels. Compared with standard baselines, the proposed approach yields more coherent and interpretable communities aligned with political structures, with the two variants respectively recovering parties and coalitions. Activity-based criteria for selecting leaders produce qualitatively similar but consistently weaker results, particularly at the coalition level. Overall, our findings show that creating statistically validated networks of publicly recognized figures, whose off-platform roles constrain and stabilize their online behavior, provide a strong basis to identify discursive communities on social media. Although developed for Twitter/X, the approach is conceptually general, as it leverages structural asymmetries common to many online platforms.