[Air-L] Question: Twitter follower count distribution

[Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice)]

considering the number of followers is a count variable (non-negative discrete numbers), is is either a poisson, negative-binomial, or sero-inflated distribution
log-transforming the distribution for further (statistical) analysis is not advised.

best 
Maurice


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Van: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> namens Jakob Jünger <jakob.juenger at uni-greifswald.de>
Verzonden: woensdag 6 mei 2020 21:44
Aan: Aram Sinnreich; air-l at listserv.aoir.org
CC: Marie-Luise von Berg
Onderwerp: Re: [Air-L] Question: Twitter follower count distribution

Sorry, the images were stripped out (thought I saw image attachments on
the list before):

News outlets: https://tinyurl.com/y9xsk8s3
Comm scholars: https://tinyurl.com/y7jnx348


Am 06.05.2020 um 21:31 schrieb Jakob Jünger:
> Dear Aram,
>
> that question also interests me.
>
> Based on data from two projects, I assume the distribution doesn't
> follow a power law, but rather a lognormal distribution (maybe MLP,
> modified lognormal power-law?). Though, I didn't have time to dig into
> it yet. See below, the first picture is based on follower counts of
> 350 German news outlets, the second is from a study about 1835
> communication scholars
> (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444819863413). It
> looks to me like there are some tiers or superimposed distributions.
> Sample size is somewhat small, maybe someone has insight into the
> distributions on a larger data basis?
>
> Cheers
> Jakob
>
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> Am 06.05.2020 um 17:28 schrieb Aram Sinnreich:
>> Hey Fellow AoIRistas,
>>
>> Quick question: Do you know of any top-down measures of the
>> distribution of follower numbers for Twitter accounts? I'm sure the
>> curve overall looks like a standard power law distribution, but I'm
>> interested to know whether there are emergent tiers (e.g. <250;
>> 251-2,500; 2501-10,000; 10,001+) or something along those lines.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Aram

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