Identifying Influential Users in Twitter Networks of the Turkish Diaspora in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany

Abstract

This study investigates how members of the Turkish diaspora connected online using Twitter as a social medium during the Gezi Park protests and how those connections and the structure of the resulting Twitter network changed after the protests ended. Further, the authors examine respondents' online influence and their roles in the movement, using social network centrality measures and Tommasel and Godoy's (2015) novel metric. The authors utilize data from Twitter to determine the connections between 307 distinct users, using both online and offline surveys. The findings reveal that Turkish diaspora members' use of Twitter provided the impetus for larger structural changes to the Twitter network. Moreover, results indicate that users' influence was not related to the frequency of their re-tweets or the number of their Twitter followers. Rather, users' influence corresponds to other factors such as their ability to spread information and engage with other users and also to the importance of their Twitter content.