Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers.
Huberman et al. REF studied social interactions on Twitter to reveal that the driving process for usage is a sparse hidden network underlying the friends and followers, while most of the links represent meaningless interactions.
Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science Physics