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Twitter ain't without frontiers: economic, social, and cultural boundaries in international communication

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

With the advent of Twitter and other lightweight social-networking services, one might think that it is easier than ever to maintain geographically dispersed, weaker social ties. By contrast, in this study we show that the international Twitter communication landscape is not only still largely predetermined by physical distance, but that it also depends on countries' social, economic, and cultural attributes. We describe a study of an international Twitter mention network of 13 million users across over 100 countries. We show that the Gravity Model, which hypothesizes that the flow between two areas is proportional to their masses (which we approximate using internet penetration) and inversely proportional to the distance between them, is correlated (r=0.68) with the international communication flow. Using this model, along with other social, economic, and cultural variables, we predict the communication volume at Adjusted R2 of $0.80$, with trade, language and racial intolerance especially impacting communication. We discuss the implications of these barriers to communication in the contexts of collaborative work, software design, and recommendation systems.

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Twitter ain't Without Frontiers: Economic, Social, and Cultural Boundaries in International Communication

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
      February 2014
      1600 pages
      ISBN:9781450325400
      DOI:10.1145/2531602
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      Published: 15 February 2014

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      1. communication
      2. culture
      3. social media

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