Who Communicates with Whom? Measuring Communication Choices on Social Media Sites

People on social media web sites are connected in many different ways. Communication networks are one important element. When analyzing the communication choices in such social media environments, the existence and dynamics of these different networks should be taken into account. The paper proposes a Markov process framework which includes an exponential random graph model that allows to estimate in how far communication depends on previous communication between actors, on affiliation with media items or other objects, on other actor networks and on actor attributes. A new software was developed to estimate the influence of certain structures in these networks on communication choices.