Random team assignments in a professional firm reveal that indirect ties strongly increase new direct tie formation, while effects of degree and local density are smaller and less robust.
The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph
3 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 784 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
We study the structure of the social graph of active Facebook users, the largest social network ever analyzed. We compute numerous features of the graph including the number of users and friendships, the degree distribution, path lengths, clustering, and mixing patterns. Our results center around three main observations. First, we characterize the global structure of the graph, determining that the social network is nearly fully connected, with 99.91% of individuals belonging to a single large connected component, and we confirm the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon on a global scale. Second, by studying the average local clustering coefficient and degeneracy of graph neighborhoods, we show that while the Facebook graph as a whole is clearly sparse, the graph neighborhoods of users contain surprisingly dense structure. Third, we characterize the assortativity patterns present in the graph by studying the basic demographic and network properties of users. We observe clear degree assortativity and characterize the extent to which "your friends have more friends than you". Furthermore, we observe a strong effect of age on friendship preferences as well as a globally modular community structure driven by nationality, but we do not find any strong gender homophily. We compare our results with those from smaller social networks and find mostly, but not entirely, agreement on common structural network characteristics.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 3roles
background 2polarities
background 2representative citing papers
New enumeration algorithms for minimal removable sets in monotone systems yield O((n+m) log n) time for k-cores and O((n+m) log n)-delay for all k-core subgraphs.
GraphMind equips LLM agents with graph awareness to construct human-like social networks, producing botnets that substantially degrade performance of both text-based and graph-based detectors.
citing papers explorer
-
Causal inference for social network formation
Random team assignments in a professional firm reveal that indirect ties strongly increase new direct tie formation, while effects of degree and local density are smaller and less robust.
-
Fast Enumeration of Minimal Removable Sets in Monotone Systems with Application to Core Collapse Analysis
New enumeration algorithms for minimal removable sets in monotone systems yield O((n+m) log n) time for k-cores and O((n+m) log n)-delay for all k-core subgraphs.
-
Beyond Individual Mimicry: Constructing Human-Like Social network with Graph-Augmented LLM Agents
GraphMind equips LLM agents with graph awareness to construct human-like social networks, producing botnets that substantially degrade performance of both text-based and graph-based detectors.