Trusting the Social Web: issues and challenges

Abstract

The phenomenon of the Social Web (i.e., the Web of Social Media) has caught the attention of research communities in the last decade. Researchers from diverse disciplines ranging from social and behavioral sciences to computer science have started investigating the issues and challenges in the Social Web. Within computer science, researchers from established research areas such as language technologies, machine learning, and service and cloud computing have started looking into the computational and development challenges brought about by the Social Web. With the continued reports of breach of trust and hoax news spreading from social media to mainstream news, trusting the Social Web has become one of the major challenges that need to be addressed. This special issue focuses on this challenge. In this editorial note, we provide a brief introduction of the Social Web, followed by a discussion on the major challenges in building a trusted Social Web. Finally, we present recent work in trusting the Social Web through a summary of the papers included in this special issue. Social media is increasingly becoming mainstream for a variety of purposes, ranging from online journalism (e.g., blogs), online knowledge bases (e.g., Wikepedia), online marketing (e.g., Twitter), to keeping in touch with friends, family and professional colleagues online (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). These technologies have given rise to a web of social media, also known as the Social Web. The popularity of the Social Web has been overwhelming. It is reported in [8] that 67 % of online adults are connected to one or more social media, and that a large proportion of them first check in to their favorite social media site everyday. This trend is likely to grow as the number of Android-based smartphones shipments alone is expected to reach 1 billion by 2013 [13]. Additionally, the value of social commerce is expected to reach 30 billion dollars within next 5 years. Similarly, 13 % of digital news consumers follow recommendations from Twitter and Facebook. Therefore, the World Wide Web (2015) 18:1–7 DOI 10.1007/s11280-013-0252-2