Data from: Geographies of an online social network

How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space?
Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the
“death of distance”, physical proximity is still a major factor in social
tie formation and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is
unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online
social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of
the former major Hungarian online social network is analyzed. We find that
the distance dependence is weaker for the online social network ties than
what was found earlier for phone communication networks. For a further
analysis we introduced a coarser granularity: We identified the
settlements with the nodes of a network and assigned two kinds of weights
to the links between them. When the weights are proportional to the number
of contacts we observed weakly formed, but spatially based modules
resemble to the borders of macro-regions, the highest level of regional
administration in the country. If the weights are defined relative to an
uncorrelated null model, the next level of administrative regions,
counties are reflected.