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Beyond Groups: Uncovering Dynamic Communities on the WhatsApp Network of Information Dissemination

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Book cover Social Informatics (SocInfo 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12467))

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the network of information dissemination that emerges from group communication in the increasingly popular WhatsApp platform. We aim to reveal properties of the underlying structure that facilitates content spread in the system, despite limitations the application imposes in group membership. Our analyses reveal a number of strongly connected user communities that cross the boundaries of groups, suggesting that such boundaries offer little constraint to information spread. We also show that, despite frequent changes in community membership, there are consistent co-sharing activities among some users which, even while holding broad content diversity, lead to high coverage of the network in terms of groups and individual users.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Indeed, our data contains only cellular phone numbers. Thus, we are not able to identify the same user with multiple phone numbers.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by grants from FAPEMIG, CNPQ and CAPES.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Gabriel Peres Nobre, Carlos Henrique Gomes Ferreira & Jussara Marques Almeida

  2. Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Ouro Preto, Brazil

    Carlos Henrique Gomes Ferreira

Authors
  1. Gabriel Peres Nobre
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  2. Carlos Henrique Gomes Ferreira
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  3. Jussara Marques Almeida
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gabriel Peres Nobre .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

    Samin Aref

  2. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Kalina Bontcheva

  3. King’s College London, London, UK

    Marco Braghieri

  4. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Frank Dignum

  5. ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Fosca Giannotti

  6. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Francesco Grisolia

  7. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Dino Pedreschi

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Nobre, G.P., Ferreira, C.H.G., Almeida, J.M. (2020). Beyond Groups: Uncovering Dynamic Communities on the WhatsApp Network of Information Dissemination. In: Aref, S., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_19

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