Global connectivity and multilinguals in the Twitter network

Conference item

This article analyzes the global connectivity of the Twitter retweet and mentions network and the role of multilingual users engaging with content in multiple languages. The network is heavily structured by language with most mentions and retweets directed to users writing in the same language. Users writing in multiple languages are more active, authoring more tweets than monolingual users. These multilingual users play an important bridging role in the global connectivity of the network. The mean level of insularity from speakers in each language does not correlate straightforwardly with the size of the user base as predicted by previous research. Finally, the English language does play more of a bridging role than other languages, but the role played collectively by multilingual users across different languages is the largest bridging force in the network.

Authors: Hale, SA

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Pages: 833-842
• Publication date: 2014-04-26
• Acceptance date: 2014-01-13
• Event title: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014)
• Event location: Toronto, Canada
• Event website: http://chi2014.acm.org
• Event start date: 2014-04-26
• Event end date: 2014-05-01
• DOI: 10.1145/2556288.2557203
• ISBN: 9781450324731
• Language: English
• Keywords: micro-blogs; cross-language; multilingual; information diffusion; information discovery; social media; social network analysis