Exploring social media network landscape of post-Soviet space

Abstract

The “post-Soviet space" consists of countries with a substantial fraction of the world’s population; however, unlike many other regions, its social media network landscape is still somewhat underexplored. This study aims at filling this gap. To this purpose, we use anonymized data on user friendships at VK.com (also known as VKontakte and, informally, as “Russian Facebook"), which is the largest and most popular social media portal in the post-Soviet space with hundreds of millions of user accounts. Using the VK network snapshots from October 2015 and December 2016, we conduct a “multiscale” empirical study of this network by considering connections between individual users, cities, and countries. Our findings indicate that VK users form a small-world network with basic characteristics consistent with Facebook and other social media networks. In addition, the analysis of modularity-based communities within the user scale network reveals a pattern of geographical separation of the identified communities mostly along the borders between countries. However, the comparison of the two network snapshots suggests that some of these communities may be “blending” within the network, whereas other communities remain “self-contained.” Further, the analysis of city scale and country scale networks identifies cities and countries that are most “central” (in the context of certain metrics) in the VK network.