STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF POLITICAL GROUPS WITHIN THE “VK” SOCIAL NETWORK: COMMUNICATIVE ASPECT

Abstract

The paper presents a research of structural features of informal and official types of political communities within the VK (VKontakte) social network. To collect data from political communities, the author has developed a script that allows parsing data from the VK by the number of friends of each participant within a community (social capital of community participants), as well as getting data on comments left by participants on public pages. Despite the initially different positioning of the two types of communities, political communities of different types are appeared to have a similar social and communicative structures, owing to the topics of communities and their goals. However, informal communities feature a more uneven distribution of participants: there are several leaders in groups forming their clusters inside the public page, and the number of participants with 1 or 2 friends in a group or no friends at all (“observers”) is much higher there. Simultaneously, official public pages have a high density and a quite high clustering coefficient, which suggests that at the right moment those communities' offline political activity can be used to organize people online. Moreover, unofficial public pages embrace a large number of actors with a high degree of intermediaсу.