The geographical characteristics of WeChat propagation network

Abstract

WeChat is one of the most popular social media applications, its characteristics of using easily and privacy make it accepted by the majority of Chinese. Because of the feature of privacy, public opinion in WeChat is difficult to monitor. We can build the WeChat social network simulation system to study how to monitor it. Studying the propagation feature of WeChat-messages is of great significance for establishment of the system. Due to the difficulty in obtaining data, current researches hardly study on the WeChat-messages’ propagation characteristics. This paper get the geographical interaction activity network (GIAN) from history records of HTML5 webpages propagation in WeChat, and analyze the GIAN with the methods and techniques in the field of complex network. We have preliminary exploration on the relationship between the threshold and geographical characteristics of information propagation in WeChat, then we find that there are several geographical regions that are stable in community detection results of GIAN.