# MeV NetworkX: Network Analysis and Visualization for Tracing Disinformation
## 7 Comparison with Gephi and Hoaxy  
**Gephi** is one of the top visualization tools in social network analysis [30; 31]. It is a free open-source standalone software used for visualizations and explorations of all kinds of networks. Its advantages include high quality visualizations and the fact that knowledge of programming languages and the ability to handle large graphs are not required. Although Gephi is a leading tool for network visualizations, our MeVer NetworkX analysis and visualization tool is not comparable to Gephi. Gephi is a standalone software, as aforementioned, while the MeVer NetworkX analysis and visualization tool is provided as a web-based application. Gephi provides visualizations for large networks (i.e., it can render networks up to 300,000 nodes and 1,000,000 edges), while our tool supports smaller graphs, focusing on a specific narratives of disinformation. The main difference between the tools that makes them incomparable is that Gephi provides a multitude of functionalities for visualization and filtering, while our tool focuses more on the analysis of the accounts involved in a network, their characteristics, and the information that is disseminated through and among them.  
**Hoaxy** is a tool that visualizes the spread of information on Twitter. It supports the uploading of a CSV or JSON file containing Twitter data. For a comparison, we created CSV files compatible with Hoaxy containing the tweets of the four COVID-19-related use cases that we investigated. We submitted each file and created the graphs with Hoaxy. First, we examined the execution time needed to analyze and build the graphs. In Table 11, Hoaxy seems much faster than MeVer NetworkX in all use cases. However, we needed to consider each tool's features to decide which one is faster. Based on this, we created Table 12, in which the features of the two tools are presented side by side. Hoaxy provides far fewer features than the proposed tool. Concerning execution time, Hoaxy is faster in terms of the time needed to analyze input data and build a graph.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l} \hline \hline  & **Fauci** & **Hydro** & **Big Pharma** & **Great Reset** \\ \hline Hoaxy (time in s) & 240 & 105 & 230 & 185 \\ MeVer (time in s) & 355 & 139 & 349 & 261 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 11: Execution times of MeVer NetworkX analysis and visuazalion tool vs. Hoaxy for the four COVID-19-related use cases.  
Figure 13: Execution times in seconds needed to build and visualize small and large graphs.  
Apart from the multitude of features that the MeVer NetworkX tool provides over Hoaxy and its comparable execution time, a significant advantage of the MeVer NetworkX tool is the improved layout with non-overlapping graphs, providing users with an easy-to-digest visualization of communities. Figure 14 illustrates the graphs around the hydro topic in MeVer NetworkX (right) and Hoaxy (left). In the graph built by Hoaxy, the nodes and edges overlap and a user must zoom in and out to investigate them. Instead, the MeVer NetworkX tool provides a simple and clear visualization with different colors among communities. Moreover, the node with its interactions is highlighted by clicking on a node while the rest become blurred. In this way, a user can more easily inspectthe nodes of interest one by one.