Analyzing the strength of ties of Retweet in health domain

Abstract

Social Network (SN) is created whenever people interact with other people. Online SN gained considerable popularity in the last years such as Fa- cebook, Twitter and etc Twitter is SN and microblogging service that creates some interesting social network structures - follow relationships. Users follow someone mostly because they share common interests and they may exchange messages called tweets. If a user post a tweet, if their follower like it they repost it or retweet it. In this context, we aim to explore and study the topological structure of user‟s retweet network, as well, new scaling measures based on strength of retweet ties. The findings suggested that relations of “friendship” are important but not enough to find out how important users are. We uncovered other some principles that must be studied like, homophily phenomenon. Ho- mophily explores properties of social network relationships, i.e. the preference for associating with individuals of the same background. Last but not least, it is worth emphasizing that we uncovered a weak correlation between Degree Cen- trality and Betweenness Centrality (49 percent) in Retweet-network and strong correlation between Degree and Betweenness centrality in Follower-network (89 percent). These find suggests that retweet network may have some fractal properties.