Use Of Online Social Networks Research Articles

Intimacy as a competency: information-seeking practices in (marriage) migration online support groups

This article explores the use of online social networks for seeking and sharing information about marriage migration. In Europe, since the 1990s, this migration has faced heightened scrutiny. Laws and administrative practices have added complexity to immigration procedures. Manifold screening methods gauge the authenticity of relationships aligning with the host nation’s concept of a suitable family for integration. In this context, informal self-help groups emerged to offer support to those facing burdensome formalities and local administrative intricacies. Based on extensive qualitative fieldwork, this article examines the significance of these support groups, drawing on the concept of intimacy as a shared competency. Here, intimacy is conceived as an active relational skill that counterbalances the limitations of migration policies. The analysis transcends the division between online and offline modes of living, shedding new light on intimacy and extimité – the sharing of one’s intimate self with others for validation – in doing family.

Decentralized Identity Management in Cross-Social Network Photo Sharing

The widespread use of online social networks has resulted in a surge in photo sharing, but the vulnerability of photo privacy becomes apparent when these images are disseminated across multiple platforms. Current solutions often fall short in delivering efficient social network services without compromising user privacy. Introducing PhotoChain, a revolutionary blockchain-based framework designed to facilitate secure photo sharing across social networks. This framework incorporates advanced features, including dissemination control, face masking, photo integrity verification, access control, and dynamic privacy policy generation. Leveraging smart contracts, PhotoChain ensures a consistent consensus on dissemination control, while robust mechanisms for photo ownership identification are integrated to thwart illegal reprinting. A fully functional prototype has been implemented and rigorously tested, substantiating the framework's prowess in delivering security, efficacy, and efficiency for photo sharing across social networks. Keywords: Online social networks, PhotoChain, blockchain

A Systematic Mapping Study on Social Network Privacy: Threats and Solutions

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are becoming pervasive in today’s world. Millions of people worldwide are involved in different forms of online networking. However, this ease of use of OSNs comes with a cost in terms of privacy. Users of OSNs become victims of identity theft, cyberstalking, and information leakage, which are real threats to privacy. These threats can obtain a user’s personal information and disclose it for malicious purposes. To understand how researchers are addressing this question, the state of the art of the existing privacy threats in OSNs described in the literature and the existing academic research-based solutions to address such threats were reviewed. To this end, we performed a systematic mapping study to identify, classify and analyze them. From the initial set of 1117 papers, we selected and extracted 45 publications reporting different threats and solutions. Based on this, this is the first systematic mapping study, to provide: a) well-defined categories of specific privacy threats in the OSN domain; and b) the available academic solutions for preventing these threats. Our results serve as a guide for researchers and analysts in academia and industry to understand the most important privacy threats in OSNs and make moves towards mitigating them.

Review of the Association between Social Networks and Adolescent Development

Adolescents are consistently exposed to social networks. Considerable discourse has taken place within both the public sphere and the scientific realm regarding the correlation between social network usage during adolescence and the manifestation of both physical and mental health problems. The main object of this study was to do a thorough and systematic evaluation of the available literature that investigates the association between the well-being of teenagers and their social networks. The review incorporated a total of eleven articles. Adolescents who participate in offline social networks demonstrate an elevated degree of impact on their emotional state and feelings of isolation, although their perception of their physical appearance stays unaltered. Receiving affirmative comments and actively seeking social support can elicit a sense of contentment as well as a sense of isolation. The results from a cumulative total of seven studies continuously indicate a notable correlation between the use of online social networks and several dimensions of mental health, including mood, self-esteem, life satisfaction, body image, and overall subjective well-being. The implementation of intervention tactics and educational activities is of utmost importance in effectively addressing the possible risks to subjective well-being that are linked to online social networks among young persons, educators, and parents.

Going digital: Developing social capital through online social networks in regional SMEs—An Australian study

AbstractIn an increasingly competitive and digitalized business environment, regional SMEs have multiple opportunities to extend their face‐to‐face networking activities to the digital realm. However, there is scant research on regional Australian SMEs use of online social networks (OSNs) to network and develop social capital. This paper follows an interpretive qualitative research approach to identify how 13 regional Australian SMEs from four sparsely populated regional areas use OSNs to enable knowledge sharing and the development of social capital. Our empirical findings classified regional Australian SMEs' use of OSNs into three categories: low, medium, and high, while also identifying OSN use opportunities. We propose four propositions related to OSN adoption and use to share knowledge and develop SC: (i) implementing an OSN adoption and use strategy as part of a larger digital strategy, (ii) investing in and adopting a variety of OSN channels for knowledge sharing, (iii) gradually replacing face‐to‐face knowledge sharing with OSNs, and (iv) controlling the sharing of competitive SME knowledge when using different OSN channels. These findings are significant to encourage regional Australian SMEs to adopt and use OSN to improve innovation opportunities through networking and collaboration in an increasingly digitalized realm.

DeepMUI: A novel method to identify malicious users on online social network platforms

SummaryThe use of online social network (OSN) platforms has become an essential component of contemporary society, facilitating global connectivity, and information sharing among individuals. The proliferation of malicious users has emerged as a noteworthy obstacle, exerting a detrimental effect on the authenticity of the data disseminated through these channels. A malicious profile is created with the intention of disseminating false information, manipulating perspectives, and executing harmful actions, including phishing schemes, identity theft, and the propagation of malware. Consequently, the identification of malicious users has emerged as an essential undertaking for both OSN platforms and researchers. The objective of this study is to investigate the issue of identifying malicious users on OSN platforms. The DeepMUI model has been introduced as a new approach to identifying malicious users on OSN platforms, utilizing user profile metadata‐derived characteristics. The DeepMUI architecture is composed of long short‐term memory and convolutional neural network models. Additionally, it integrates alterations to the pooling layer to improve its overall efficacy. The experiments have demonstrated that DeepMUI exhibits promising results in the task of identifying malicious users, with greater accuracy and minimal loss compared to existing methods.

Cyberbullying in text content detection: an analytical review

Technological advancements have resulted in an exponential increase in the use of online social networks (OSNs) worldwide. While online social networks provide a great communication medium, they also increase the user's exposure to life-threatening situations such as suicide, eating disorder, cybercrime, compulsive behavior, anxiety, and depression. To tackle the issue of cyberbullying, most existing literature focuses on developing approaches to identifying factors and understanding the textual factors associated with cyberbullying. While most of these approaches have brought great success in cyberbullying research, data availability needed to develop model detection remains a challenge in the research space. This paper conducts a comprehensive literature review to provide an understanding of cyberbullying detection.

E-health, psychoactive drugs and attention psychosocial the perspective of users

In the last decade there has been an expansion in the number of people who use online social networks as well as in the number of people who abuse psychoactive drugs. Given this, the article aims to identify the difficulties encountered by users of psychoactive drugs to start the treatment of addiction and to evaluate the use of online social networks as a tool to attract users. The theme of the study reveals the importance of the internet and social networks when the objective is to reach the patient in his natural environment and to promote tools capable of motivating him to actions capable of improving his life and well-being.

A robust semi-fragile watermarking system using Pseudo-Zernike moments and dual tree complex wavelet transform for social media content authentication.

With the growing use of mobile devices and Online Social Networks (OSNs), sharing digital content, especially digital images is extremely high as well as popular. This made us convenient to handle the ongoing COVID-19 crisis which has brought about years of change in the sharing of digital content online. On the other hand, the digital image processing tools which are powerful enough to make the perfect image duplication compromises the privacy of the transmitted digital content. Therefore, content authentication, proof of ownership, and integrity of digital images are considered crucial problems in the world of digital that can be accomplished by employing a digital watermarking technique. On contrary, watermarking issues are to triumph trade-offs among imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. However, most existing systems are unable to handle the problem of tamper detection and recovery in case of intentional and unintentional attacks concerning these trade-offs. Also, the existing system fails to withstand the geometrical attacks. To resolve the above shortcomings, this proposed work offers a new multi-biometric based semi-fragile watermarking system using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) and pseudo-Zernike moments (PZM) for content authentication of social media data. In this research work, the DTCWT-based coefficients are used for achieving maximum embedding capacity. The Rotation and noise invariance properties of Pseudo Zernike moments make the system attain the highest level of robustness when compared to conventional watermarking systems. To achieve authentication and proof of identity, the watermarks of about four numbers are used for embedding as a replacement for a single watermark image in traditional systems. Among four watermarks, three are the biometric images namely Logo or unique image of the user, fingerprint biometric of the owner, and the metadata of the original media to be transmitted. In addition, to achieve the tamper localization property, the Pseudo Zernike moments of the original cover image are obtained as a feature vector and also embedded as a watermark. To attain a better level of security, each watermark is converted into Zernike moments, Arnold scrambled image, and SHA outputs respectively. Then, to sustain the trade-off among the watermarking parameters, the optimal embedding location is determined. Moreover, the watermarked image is also signed by the owner's other biometric namely digital signature, and converted into Public key matrix Pkm and embedded onto the higher frequency subband namely, HL of the 1-level DWT. The proposed system also accomplishes a multi-level authentication, among that the first level is attained by the decryption of the extracted multiple watermark images with the help of the appropriate decryption mechanism which is followed by the comparison of the authentication key which is extracted using the key which is regenerated at the receiver's end. The simulation outcomes evident that the proposed system shows superior performance towards content authentication, to most remarkable intentional and unintentional attacks among the existing watermarking systems.

Establishing ties or strengthening friendships? Students' use of online social networks in intercultural friendship development

PurposeThis study was conducted to achieve the following objectives: (1) determine the differences and reasons for using outgroup OSNs by gender, age and student groups (Mainland and Hong Kong [HK] students); (2) uncover the impact of online social networks (OSNs) on the development of Mainland–HK friendships and (3) determine the roles of different OSNs (social networking sites [SNSs] and instant messaging platforms [IMPs]) in the development of intercultural friendships in the real world.Design/methodology/approachTo explore how OSNs facilitate (or inhibit) intercultural interactions, 198 students completed a questionnaire and 24 students participated in follow-up semi-structured interviews examining the role of OSNs in intercultural friendship development.FindingsResults revealed that demographic and motivational preferences for using outgroup-OSNs differed among students. Both IMPs and SNSs helped students maintain friendships using little effort, whereas it tended to strengthen their existing social networks, rather than helping to start new friendships. IMPs helped develop a sense of “presence awareness”, strengthening pre-existing friendships and solidifying offline connections. SNSs also assisted students in exploring their shared interests while revealing their values and cultural differences.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ findings offered empirical evidence on social exchange theory and anxiety-uncertainty management theory regarding the perceived benefit of OSNs on students' friendship development.Practical implicationsThe study sheds light on the differences between Mainland Chinese and HK students, including participants' perceptions of different friendship stages.Originality/valueThis study is interested in the roles of different SNSs and IMPs in intercultural friendship development, especially their strengths and weaknesses as perceived by students. Also, the authors are curious about how students select and use IMPs and SNSs differently according to their individual preferences and needs. To the authors’ knowledge, the dynamic link between online communication and intercultural friendship development has not been thoroughly examined in the field of intercultural communication.

ASPA-MOSN: An Efficient User Authentication Scheme for Phishing Attack Detection in Mobile Online Social Networks

Over the last few years, with the massive growth of smartphone technology and mobile Internet, the use of various online social networks (OSNs) have increased rapidly. This ever-growing use of social networks leverages cyber-attackers to exploit various phishing schemes, spoofed accounts, and other threats to steal users’ credentials. Phishing is an online crime that employs both technical subterfuge and social engineering to steal consumers’ personal identity, financial account credentials, and other sensitive information. In general, a phishing attack is carried out by the exercise of sending fraudulent communications (like a fake email with harmful uniform resource locators), that pretends to come from a reputable source. The problem of designing user authentication protocol for mitigating phishing attacks in OSNs is a challenging research problem. In this article, we propose a secure and lightweight cryptography-based authentication scheme, called authentication scheme for phishing attack (ASPA)-mobile online social network (mOSN), that provides resistance to phishing and other related attacks in OSNs. The security of the proposed scheme is explained using both informal security analysis and formal security analysis through the widely recognized real-or-random model and ProVerif simulation tool. Finally, we compare the security, functionality, computation, and communication costs of the proposed ASPA-mOSN with related schemes. The comparison results show that ASPA-mOSN outperforms other existing competing schemes.

Development of an Instrument to Assess Expectations for the Use of Online Gaming, Social Networking Sites, and Online Pornography: the Marburg Internet Use Expectations (MINUS-X) Questionnaire

AbstractUser’s expectations contribute to the maintenance of problematic use of online gaming (OG), social networking (SN), and online pornography (OP). Since an instrument to assess use expectations across applications is lacking, this study aimed at developing and testing such a questionnaire. It consists of a general module (GM), which includes expectations relevant to all three applications, and three application-specific modules. A pilot and a validation study were conducted with 2880 German adults. We conducted item analyses, exploratory factor analyses (EFA), exploratory structural equation modelling, and correlation analyses. The EFA revealed six factors for the GM and two factors for each specific module. The GM demonstrated measurement invariance between applications. The instrument showed excellent psychometric properties, indicating its suitability for assessing expectations concerning the use of OG, SN, and OG reliably and validly. It could be helpful for treating patients with problematic use of the applications and investigating the role of the relevant expectations.

Problematic use of online social networks: the case of Mexican students

Social networks are one of the most relevant means of communication and leisure among the youngest. But, despite an abundance of benefits, there are also risks that must be analyzed. In this research, the risk to be analyzed is the addiction to social media among young Mexican people. For the development of the analysis, 17,600 young people responded a questionnaire based on an adaptation of Sahin’s Social Media Addiction Scale - Student Form (SMAS-SF). Among the results, it needs to be highlighted the little awareness that young people have of their addiction to social networks. Any reflection on this aspect needs to consider the limited perception presented by the sample and the fact that this study measured the self-perception of young students regarding OSM.

Privacy Threat MOdeling Language

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are becoming pervasive in today’s world. Millions of people worldwide are involved in different forms of online networking. However, this ease of use of OSNs comes with a cost in terms of privacy. Users of OSNs become victims of identity theft, cyberstalking, and information leakage, which are real threats to privacy. Consequently, new solutions need to be developed for addressing the threat scenarios to which a user is potentially exposed. In this sense, this paper presents PTMOL (Privacy Threat MOdeling Language) as an approach for modeling privacy threats in an OSN domain. The proposed language is related to the attempt to mitigate privacy threats at the design level, thus promoting concern about threats in the stages preceding the development of OSNs. Two studies were conducted to evaluate the use of PTMOL at the design stages, which provided insights into the correctness, completeness, ease of use, usefulness, user satisfaction, and feasibility of the proposal. The results indicated that PTMOL can be incorporated into software development during the design phase. Via the language, we expect to support designers in making more pre-emptive decisions about user privacy risk, and help them to introduce privacy early in the development cycle of OSNs.

Social stratification in networks: insights from co-authorship networks

It has been observed that real-world social networks often exhibit stratification along economic or other lines, with consequences for class mobility and access to opportunities. With the rise in human interaction data and extensive use of online social networks, the structure of social networks (representing connections between individuals) can be used for measuring stratification. However, although stratification has been studied extensively in the social sciences, there is no single, generally applicable metric for measuring the level of stratification in a network. In this work, we first propose the novel Stratification Assortativity (StA) metric, which measures the extent to which a network is stratified into different tiers. Then, we use the StA metric to perform an in-depth analysis of the stratification of five co-authorship networks. We examine the evolution of these networks over 50 years and show that these fields demonstrate an increasing level of stratification over time, and, correspondingly, the trajectory of a researcher's career is increasingly correlated with her entry point into the network.

Effect of Online Social Networking on High School Students Academic Performance

Online Social Networking becoming one of the most popular trends among students around the globe. There is an increasing number of research in the recent years to study this phenomenon and this study is focusing on the implications of the use of Online Social Networking towards the high school students’ academic performance in Malaysia. Achieving excellence grades is vital to the high school students because it generally will give the students a better chance to obtain a good university as well as the opportunity for enrolling for better courses when pursuing their tertiary education. Is the growing use of Online Social Networking applications detrimental to the students’ academic success? Or is the Online Social Networking use behavior among the high school students in Malaysia help them to improve their academic performance? This study shade some light. The study result shows that students’ use of Online Social Networking is positively correlated to the students’ academic performance. This result supporting some of the previous study highlighting the benefits of Online Social Networking to the students.

Drivers and barriers of using online social networking technologies among people living with HIV/AIDS in Iran

Introduction. Online social network technologies have been widely used to enhance HIV prevention, diagnosis, and treatment programs; however, little is known about the current use and potential drivers and barriers of these technologies among Iranian people living with HIV. Method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28people living with HIV/AIDS already using online social network technologies. Analysis. Thematic analysis was used to analyse interviews. Results. Results showed that the average time spent on online social network platforms was 3.5-5.7 hours daily. Peer groups and pre-existing platforms (groups) established by health care providers or community-based organisations were frequently used by people living with HIV/AIDS for communication. Seeking and sharing health information and personal experiences, staying connected with peers and care providers, and social support exchange were major drivers for using online social network platforms. Cross-posting of users or sharing irrelevant or disappointing posts, gender issues, and poor engagement of users were reported as major barriers to online social network use among respondents. Conclusions. Our findings indicated that online social network technologies have empowered Iranian people living with HIV/AIDS, making them more connected, safe, and able to access HIV/AIDS-related information and services. Future studies are needed to investigate the feasibility and acceptability of these interventions among key populations including sex workers and injection drug users

Online social networking and its relationship with mental health and emotional intelligence among female students

Over the past two decades, online social networking (OSN) is serving as a ubiquitous means of communication. The main objective behind this research is to discover the relationship between online social networking and mental health, emotional intelligence, respectively. Pearson's correlation coefficient is applied as multi-variate analysis, to assess the association between OSN, mental health and emotional intelligence. The negative correlations between OSN and mental health (−0.133) and OSN and emotional intelligence (−0.198) suggest that excessive use of OSN is detrimental to mental health and emotional intelligence. The study found that comparatively younger children have higher practice of OSN and so having lower emotional intelligence than the older ones. But in case of Mental health, relatively, older female adolescents have experienced the mental health problems. Present study concluded that there is significant relationship between online social networking, mental health and Emotional intelligence.

Use of Online Social Networks and Mental Health at maturity during the Covid-19 pandemic

The aim of this study was to analyze the impact of the use and non-use of online social networks on the mental health of Brazilians aged 50 years and over during the emergence of the Covid-19 polydemic in Brazil. 571 people participated, aged between 50 and 88 years (M=58.83; SD=6.74), 78.5% of whom were female. = 237) was composed of elderly people (over 60 years old). Regarding the use of online social networks (RSO), 93% of the participants stated that they used these tools. As instruments, we used a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20), the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD) and the Perceived Social Support Scale (EPSS). Regarding anxiety, depression, CMD and Perceived Social Support scores, no differences were found between people who use OSR and non-users of OSR.

Exploring the effects of social capital on the compulsive use of online social networks in civil unrest contexts

The use of online social networking sites has become part of everyday life for more than three billion people worldwide. However, its use may go beyond being a habit, leading to compulsive use behaviours that jeopardize the well-being of an individual and the whole society. This study proposes and evaluates a theoretical model that examines the four dimensions of social capital, mediated by bonding and bridging social capital, as drivers of compulsive use of online social networks in the context of civil unrest. We evaluate the model using partial least squares structural equation modelling with data collected from a developing country. We found that reciprocity is the most important driver for bonding and bridging social capital with online members. Whereas trust, contradicting most of the literature in the field, was not statistically significant over bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital shows a significant association with compulsive use behaviour. On the other hand, the effect of bridging social capital on compulsive use behaviour, although not significant, may become significant in the presence of a strong usage habit.