Communication based on unilateral preference on twitter: Internet luring in Japan

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on unilateral preference for a group of specific kind of persons as a factor of network formation. Homophily and preferential attachment explain a large part of the formation of online social networks (OSN). Unilateral preference is also assumed to have important roles in OSNs, where high searchability exists with no geographical restriction. To observe unilateral preferences in a social network, we analyzed a user network constructed through interaction between those who make Japanese tweet(s) about “runaway” and those who react to them. In this case, a large proportion of the tweets are assumed to be made by young girls and most of the latter are adult men. By observing the user network, the network is found to have unsurprisingly bipartite structure composed of a thousand former users and several thousand latter users. In spite of a few friendship links among these users, about 19% of users in the latter group take one-to-many communication with users in the former group. Therefore, communications that assumed to be based on unilateral preference exist on a considerable scale. The proportion of reply message between users that regarded to have an intention of luring is surprisingly high (61%). Furthermore, we extract the core of communication by applying k-core network analysis. As a result, the proportion of luring in the core of the network is significantly higher than outside of the k-core network.