Interactions between world leaders on social media
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-08-explores-interactions-world-leaders-social.html
Social media is one of the most influential sources in modern days. The interactions between users online often reveal their relationships offline. This article written by Ingrid Fadelli explores the research topic of Interactions between world leaders on social media which relied heavily on social networks to perform the analysis. The study in the article mainly focuses on the interactions of the world leaders on Twitter and uses “a direct link in a mention network” as an indication of their importance in the network at a static level.
The researchers compiled a dataset of world leaders from 193 countries on Twitter. The analysis illustrated that “leaders from democratic states are more likely to engage with other democratic leaders.” This finding reminds me of the Triadic closure principle, if two people have a friend in common, they are more likely to be friends themselves, and because the democratic leaders shared the same democratic beliefs, this principle justified the connections amongst the democratic leaders. In addition to this principle, I suspect that this is an Egocentric network analysis because to find the interactions amongst the leaders, it makes sense to start with a central user then trace for the interactions in order to better identify this social network.