An Examination of Users' Influence in Online HIV/AIDS Communities

A network perspective was adopted in this study to identify influential users in an online HIV community in China. Specifically, the indegree centrality, outdegree centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and clustering coefficient of individuals were evaluated to measure the user influence in such a community. Moreover, this study examined how the digital divide, which is presently one of the major social equity issues in the information society, is associated with an individual's influence within the community. Two networks were formed on the basis of the behavioral data retrieved from the HIV community: the follower-followee network and the post-reply network. In the follower-followee network, members from areas with well-developed technologies demonstrated more connections, received more attention, and secured more critical positions in the network than their counterparts. However, such differences were insignificant in the post-reply network.