Definition of status and value assortativity in complex networks and their evaluation in Threads

The concept of “assortativity” was introduced to denote the preference of a network node to relate to other nodes similar in some way. This concept is closely related to that of homophily, which is used in Social Network Analysis to indicate that users tend to connect with others who have similar characteristics. It is possible to distinguish between two types of homophily, namely status homophily and value homophily. We believe that this distinction can be extended to assortativity. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel conceptualization of assortativity by introducing status and value assortativity. This dual categorization provides a comprehensive understanding of both structural and content-based dimensions of network interactions. We apply these new assortativity concepts to Threads, a new social platform launched by Meta, and demonstrate their relevance and versatility in the analysis of emerging online platforms. Assortativity has been extensively studied in major social networks and various complex networks, but not in Threads, as this social platform is new. Introducing two types of assortativity and computing them for Threads are two important contributions of this paper. Actually, we provide a third. In fact, in the past literature, we did not find any dataset on Threads that could enable our assortativity analysis. To address this issue, we built a dataset and make it available to the scientific community for future investigations and analyses on Threads.