Social media locality in a tribal network

Tribal areas continue to be some of the most under-serviced places in the U.S. with respect to broadband coverage. De- spite tribal and FCC interests in addressing this issue, there has never been a network-based characterization on how ex- isting broadband services in these are areas are used. We present one of the first of such characterizations by analyz- ing traffic from the Tribal Digital Village (TDV) network, a tribal operated network that provides initial Internet ser- vices to 576 facilities in rural San Diego county. Our study reveals that the most requested web application in the net- work is Instagram, which has not yet been characterized in a community setting. Overall, we identify a high locality of interest with respect to content and social connectivity: 27% of the 150,368 unique media objects circulated in TDV In- stagram traffic were produced by TDV users; local content creators have 8.2× more engagement with their media on the TDV network than non-local content creators; 26.5% of the 7.9 million media downloads were downloaded by mul- tiple TDV network users; and on average, 42.6% of a user's 1-hop social neighborhood is comprised of users from the same reservation.