Star Network Motifs on X during COVID-19

Lynnette Hui Xian Ng; Divyaansh Sinha; Kathleen M. Carley

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arXiv · 2508.00975

Star Network Motifs on X during COVID-19

Lynnette Hui Xian Ng·Divyaansh Sinha·Kathleen M. Carley

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Abstract

Social network motifs are recurring patterns of small subgraphs that indicate fundamental patterns of social communication. In this work, we study the simple star network motifs that recur on X during the COVID-19 discourse. We study the profile of the manifestation of the star network among bot and human users. There are six primary patterns of the star motif, differentiating by the bots and humans being either egos and alters. We describe the presentation of each of these six patterns in our data, demonstrating how the motif patterns can inform social media behavioral analysis.

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Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Divyaansh Sinha, Kathleen M. Carley. 2025-08-01. Star Network Motifs on X during COVID-19. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00975

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