TY - JOUR
T1 - Extremely Low Reciprocity and Strong Homophily in the World Largest MSM Social Network
AU - Cai, Mengsi
AU - Huang, Ge
AU - Kretzschmar, Mirjam E.
AU - Chen, Xiaohong
AU - Lu, Xin
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received November 7, 2020; revised May 10, 2021; accepted May 30, 2021. Date of publication June 2, 2021; date of current version September 16, 2021. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 91846301, 72088101, 71771213, and 72025405, MC is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 82041020, 71690233, and 71790615. MEK acknowledges support from the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw; Grant no. 91216062). This study was also supported by the Hunan Science and Technology Plan Project under Grants 2019GK2131 and 2020TP1013. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Recommended for acceptance by Dr. Caterina Scoglio. (Corresponding author: Xin Lu.) Mengsi Cai is with the National University of Defense Technology, Chang-sha 410073, China (e-mail: [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.
PY - 2021/7/1
Y1 - 2021/7/1
N2 - Traditional survey-based methods are limited in the sample size and inference ability for the study of men who have sex with men (MSM), one of the most vulnerable groups at increased risk of HIV. Internet data, on the other hand, have provided publicly accessible information about such groups at unprecedented scale and resolution. Here we present statistics for the user demographics characteristics in the worlds largest MSM geosocial networking application, Blued, and analyze the social network structure with 11,408,872 nodes and 838,910,078 edges extracted from user-following relationships on Blued. Network features, such as degree distribution, reciprocity, degree assortativity, homophily, and community are studied. We find that, in contrast to earlier analyses on social networks of general populations, the MSM social network is disassortative and shows extremely low reciprocity. Users in their twenties are excessively followed by users from all age groups, and network homophily for age and country are strong.
AB - Traditional survey-based methods are limited in the sample size and inference ability for the study of men who have sex with men (MSM), one of the most vulnerable groups at increased risk of HIV. Internet data, on the other hand, have provided publicly accessible information about such groups at unprecedented scale and resolution. Here we present statistics for the user demographics characteristics in the worlds largest MSM geosocial networking application, Blued, and analyze the social network structure with 11,408,872 nodes and 838,910,078 edges extracted from user-following relationships on Blued. Network features, such as degree distribution, reciprocity, degree assortativity, homophily, and community are studied. We find that, in contrast to earlier analyses on social networks of general populations, the MSM social network is disassortative and shows extremely low reciprocity. Users in their twenties are excessively followed by users from all age groups, and network homophily for age and country are strong.
KW - Blued
KW - Crawlers
KW - Electronic mail
KW - Internet
KW - MSM
KW - Network analysis
KW - Social network
KW - Social networking (online)
KW - Social networking application
KW - Sociology
KW - Statistics
KW - Systems engineering and theory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107351790&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TNSE.2021.3085984
DO - 10.1109/TNSE.2021.3085984
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85107351790
VL - 8
SP - 2279
EP - 2287
JO - IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
IS - 3
ER -