Alkhasov S.S. Study of the structure of the social graph of VKontakte users — members of groups promoting the criminal subculture (the example of the Irkutsk city). Nauchnoe obozrenie. Seriya 2. Gumanitarnye nauki [Scientific Review. Series 2. Human Sciences]. 2020. No. 3-4. Р. 52-58. DOI: 10.26653 ...

Abstract

We consider the structure of the social graph of VKontakte social network users — members of groups promoting the criminal youth subculture of AUE (banned in Russia as an extremist organization). We show that this phenomenon cannot be judged as a large-scale and ramified criminal organization because about 90% of subscribers of AUE groups are unfamiliar with each other. We reveal that non-isolated members of these groups (i.e. remaining 10% of all subscribers) do not form a single connected subgraph, but are included in one of 24 separate connected subgraphs. The largest connected subgraph consists of 59 nodes. This study is for the city of Irkutsk because it is one of the places where this subculture originated. In the engineering part of our work, this study is based on using of the application programming interface (API) of the above social network and a set of libraries for the high-level programming language Python 3.7.