Rarely Seen ‘Wormholes’ Contract Global Social Networks

We report the discovery of high bandwidth bridge ties (or ""wormholes"") in population-scale social networks. Social ties that bridge between clusters are widely assumed to be relatively rare and to connect acquaintances whose interactions are sporadic and emotionally distant, but researchers have lacked the global network data needed to verify the predicted weakness. Using data for 56M Twitter users from eight culturally and economically diverse countries, supplemented with nationwide telephone data, we confirmed the predicted scarcity of long bridge ties but not their weakness. Instead, these ""social wormholes"" are far stronger in some cases than embedded ties with a friend in common, thereby contracting extreme network distances, with important implications for social integration and the rapid diffusion of persuasive communications that require strong social bonds.