Finding interest groups from Twitter lists

Twitter lists enable users of the social network to organize people they follow into groups of interest (e.g. politicians or journalists they like, favorite artists or athletes, authoritative figures in a given field, and so on). For the analyst, lists are a means of access to the structure of interactions between Twitter users and can be used to identify main actors of a field of interest. In this work, we introduce a methodology for constructing an edge-attributed multilayer network of Twitter users based on their membership to Twitter lists. We propose and validate a new approach that identifies local communities of users and their common interests from the constructed graph. We provide evidences that our method performs in a better way than global community detection approaches, and faster with as good results as competitive local methods.