Title
Analysing Dunbar Circles in Facebook Groups
Abstract
The impact of Online Social Networks (OSNs) on the world has changed the way people interact with each other. During the last years, the trend to build virtual communities based on common interests, also called online social groups, has affirmed. Online social groups have been studied in the past, however, several aspects concerning the relationships between the group members are still unknown. Indeed, the definition of classical friendship relations in a social network is different from the social relationships established in a group. The former are defined with the will of the users, while the latter are implicitly activated by the interactions on the common topics. In this paper, we provide an analysis of the users' relationships present in 18 heterogeneous Facebook groups and we model the interactions of a group member within the group with the concept of member network. Then, we verify that the relationships present in the personal network of a user follow the Dunbar's property, previously detected in offline and online friendship ego networks. The results show that most personal networks present three or four circles as in classical Dunbar's structure, with a size comparable to the one initially described by Dunbar.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/CCNC49032.2021.9369495
2021 IEEE 18th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Online Social Networks,Users' Behaviour,Dunbar's Circles,Online Social Groups,Homophily,Facebook Groups
Conference
2331-9852
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-9795-1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Barbara Guidi111.02
Andrea Michienzi254.55
L. Ricci38214.76
Vincenzo Ambriola400.34