Journalists’ ego networks in Twitter: Invariant and distinctive structural features

Abstract

Ego networks have proved to be a valuable tool for understanding the relationships that individuals establish with their peers, both in offline and online social networks. Particularly interesting are the cognitive constraints associated with the interactions between the ego and the members of their ego network, which limit individuals to maintain meaningful interactions with no more than 150 people, on average, and to arrange such relationships along concentric circles of decreasing engagement. In this work, we focus on the ego networks of journalists on Twitter, considering 17 different countries, and we investigate whether they feature the same characteristics observed for other relevant classes of Twitter users, like politicians and generic users. Our findings are that journalists are generally more active and interact with more people than generic users, regardless of their country. Their ego network structure is very aligned with reference models derived in anthropology and observed in general human ego networks. Remarkably, the similarity is even higher than the one of politicians and generic users ego networks. This may imply a greater cognitive involvement with Twitter for journalists than for other user categories. From a dynamic perspective, journalists have stable short-term relationships that do not change much over time. In the longer term, though, ego networks can be pretty dynamic, especially in the innermost circles. Moreover, the ego-alter ties of journalists are often information-driven, as they are mediated by hashtags both at their inception and during their lifetime. Finally, we found that relationships between journalists are assortative in popularity: journalists tend to engage with other journalists of similar popularity, in all layers but especially in their innermost ones. Instead, when journalists interact with generic users, this assortativity is only present in the innermost layers.