Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 355
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30599-6

Regular Article

Google matrix of Twitter

Laboratoire de Physique Théorique du CNRS, IRSAMC, Université de Toulouse, UPS, 31062 Toulouse, France

^a e-mail: dima@irsamc.ups-tlse.fr

Received: 14 July 2012
Received in final form: 14 July 2012
Published online: 24 October 2012

Abstract

We construct the Google matrix of the entire Twitter network, dated by July 2009, and analyze its spectrum and eigenstate properties including the PageRank and CheiRank vectors and 2DRanking of all nodes. Our studies show much stronger inter-connectivity between top PageRank nodes for the Twitter network compared to the networks of Wikipedia and British Universities studied previously. Our analysis allows to locate the top Twitter users which control the information flow on the network. We argue that this small fraction of the whole number of users, which can be viewed as the social network elite, plays the dominant role in the process of opinion formation on the network.