The social life of social networks: Facebook linkage patterns in the 2008 U.S. presidential election

This paper examines the linkage patterns of people who posted links on the Facebook “walls” of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain over two years prior to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Linkage patterns indicate the destinations to which participants in these social networking dialogues wished to send other participants. We show a strong integration of the Web 2.0 and new media technologies of social networking, online video, and blogs. Outside of video content, users tended to direct others to groups and applications within the Facebook community, but this homophilous behavior was more common for infrequent posters. Ten internet domains accounted for 90% of all links, and the top ten contained a mixture of news, candidate, and blog sites. We offer a discussion of the Facebook candidate walls as a public sphere for political discourse and introduce some design concepts for visualizing and navigating the walls.