2024/06/25 by Márton Menyhért, Eszter Bokányi, Menyhért, Márton +9 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social Media and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.17752
openalex publication_date 2024/06/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The dominance of online social media data as a source of population-scale social network studies has recently been challenged by networks constructed from government-curated register data. In this paper, we investigate how the two compare, focusing on aggregations of the Dutch online social network (OSN) Hyves and a register-based social network (RSN) of the Netherlands. First and foremost, we find that the connectivity of the two population-scale networks is strikingly similar, especially between closeby municipalities, with more long-distance ties captured by the OSN. This result holds when correcting for population density and geographical distance, notwithstanding that these two patterns appear to be the main drivers of connectivity. Second, we show that the community structure of neither network follows strict administrative geographical delineations (e.g., provinces). Instead, communities appear to either center around large metropolitan areas or, outside of the country's most urbanized area, are comprised of large blocks of interdependent municipalities. Interestingly, beyond population and distance-related patterns, communities also highlight the persistence of deeply rooted historical and sociocultural communities based on religion. The results of this study suggest that both online social networks and register-based social networks are valuable resources for insights into the social network structure of an entire population.