Social Online Research Articles

Providing a Link Prediction Model based on Structural and Homophily Similarity in Social Networks

In recent years, with the growing number of online social networks, these networks have become one of the best markets for advertising and commerce, so studying these networks is very important. Forecasting new edges in online social networks can give us a better understanding of the growth of these networks. There have been many studies of link prediction in the field of engineering and humanities. Scientists attribute the existence of a new relationship between two individuals for two reasons: 1) Proximity to the graph (structure) 2) Similar properties of the two individuals (Homophile law). However, studying the impact of the two approaches working together to create new edges remains an open problem. Similarity metrics can also be divided into two categories; Neighborhood-based and path-based. So far, the above two theoretical approaches (proximity and homophile) have not been found together in the neighborhood-based metrics. In this paper, we first attempt to provide a solution to determine importance of the proximity to the graph and similar features in the connectivity of the graphs. Then obtained weights are assigned to both proximity and homophile. Then the best similarity metric in each approach are obtained. Finally, the selected metric of homophily similarity and structural similarity are combined with the obtained weights. The results of this study were evaluated on two datasets; Zanjan University Graduate School of Social Sciences and Pokec online Social Network. The first data set was collected for this study and then the questionnaires and data collection methods were filled out. Since this dataset is one of the few Iranian datasets that has been compiled with its users' specifications, it can be of great value. In this paper, we have been able to increase the accuracy of Neighborhood-based similarity metric by using two proximity in graph and homophily approaches.

The Association Between Community Participation and Social Internet Use Among Adults With Traumatic Brain Injury.

To examine the association between social Internet use and real-world societal participation in survivors of moderate-severe traumatic brain injury. Prospective cross-sectional observational study. Ten Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems Centers. A total of 331 participants in the Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems, interviewed at any follow-up year between April 2014 and March 2015. Survey on Internet use, including social media and other online socialization; Participation Assessment with Recombined Tools-Objective with separate analyses of Productivity, Social Relations, Out and About subscales; covariates included demographics, injury variables, and functional and emotional status at follow-up. Participants were classified as social Internet users (N = 232) or nonusers (N = 99). Users had significantly higher Participation Assessment with Recombined Tools-Objective Social Relations scores than nonusers. A similar finding pertained to Out and About scores, with the between-group difference significantly greater for those with greater depressive symptoms severity. Users and nonusers did not differ significantly on Productivity subscale. The positive association between social Internet use and real-world social participation suggests that people with traumatic brain injury do not use social media as an alternative to real-world socialization. Rather, it is likely that similar barriers and facilitators affect both online and real-world social participation following traumatic brain injury. Emotional function should be considered as a moderating factor in further studies.

Steem Blockchain: Mining the Inner Structure of the Graph

Since their introduction, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have transformed the way people interact with each other. Lately, a new trend is rising in the development of OSNs, fueled by an increasing interest of the blockchain technology and the benefits it can bring to the world of OSNs. Blockchain Online Social Media (BOSMs) are Social Media applications that are supported by the blockchain technology. Thanks to a blockchain, BOSMs either try to enforce the privacy of the users or try to redistribute with their users the economic wealth generated by the platform through a rewarding system. There are countless BOSMs available which incorporate a rewarding system. Among them, Steemit can be considered the most well-known platform exceeding 1 million registered users. Steemit is supported by the blockchain Steem, which is a blockchain that natively supports the development of social applications by the usage of transactions that model social activity. Even if other important blockchains, such as Ethereum has been widely analysed, at the best of our knowledge, no study exists concerning the topology of the transactions graph of Steem. The main goal of this paper is to study the structure of the Steem transaction graph to understand its characteristics and unveil crucial knowledge concerning their users. More in detail, we build the Interactions Graph and, after its study, we evaluate three subgraphs that capture its social and monetary aspects. The degree distributions of the graphs follow a power-law. Additionally, we detect a substantial number of bots that offer paid services on the platform among the most active users. Lastly, the investigation of the four analysed graphs through a bow-tie structure, suggesting that half of the users have a passive social behaviour and that 80% of the users tend to accrue economic value.

Research on the improve rumour propagation model based on SIR

As the basic mechanism of network information dissemination in online socialisation, rumours have had a significant impact on people's lives. In this paper, a SIR-based rumour propagation model is introduced, which gives the probability expression of the user's chosen role in the social network. And on this basis, the propagation process of rumours in the network is analysed and combined with the behaviour characteristics that users may present to conduct data simulation and explore the connection between users and rumours. In order to test the rationality of the SIR model, the real rumour propagation data in the network is introduced, and then the difference between the rumour propagation process and the real situation obtained by the comparative model analysis is analysed.

La socialità mediata: Strategie e modalità comunicative degli adolescenti tra online e offline

This article analyses the online consumption styles and social relations of adolescents based on the integration of online and offline contexts, accounting for age and gender differences. With respect to this theme, the more recent national and international literature has considered the distinction between ‘real world’ and ‘virtual world’ anachronistic. Current studies consider online and offline spaces not as exclusive worlds to choose from but as two absolutely ‘real’ sides of the same experience. The use and consumption styles of digital media represent high-tech bricolage forms for young people, and communication and online socializing among peers seem to play a positive role in the development of social skills and the sense of identity for adolescents. Moreover, numerous empirical findings highlight an overlap between offline and network-mediated relationships, which tend to integrate traditional social behaviour rather than increase or decrease it. Starting from this theoretical framework, the quantitative research project “Young people and digital media within and outside the school: practices, relationships and sociality” – carried out in collaboration between the universities of Genova, Milano Bicocca, Padova and Salerno – involved a sample of 771 second and fourth grade high school students. The survey was carried out through the administration of a questionnaire in the urban and extra-urban contexts of Como, Genoa, Padua and Salerno. Schools and classes were selected via purposive sampling involving the following upper secondary schools: lyceums, technical institutes and vocational institutes. The results presented in this article focus specifically on the network’s use types and on online and offline relational modes. The findings show how the network is perceived in a multidimensional way by the young respondents, declined as an extension of face-to-face relations, a way to discover new things about known people, a recreational digital space, an expansion of knowledge opportunities and, finally, a place for social experimentation. As for the specific theme of the mediated sociality, in line with what emerges in previous studies, the results seem to confirm that the relations mediated by the network are not a substitute for face-to-face relationships. Rather, they represent an extension for getting in touch with friends and the peer group in order to share different activities and interests.

Research on the improve rumour propagation model based on SIR

As the basic mechanism of network information dissemination in online socialisation, rumours have had a significant impact on people's lives. In this paper, a SIR-based rumour propagation model is introduced, which gives the probability expression of the user's chosen role in the social network. And on this basis, the propagation process of rumours in the network is analysed and combined with the behaviour characteristics that users may present to conduct data simulation and explore the connection between users and rumours. In order to test the rationality of the SIR model, the real rumour propagation data in the network is introduced, and then the difference between the rumour propagation process and the real situation obtained by the comparative model analysis is analysed.

A Privacy-Preserving Framework With Self-Governance and Permission Delegation in Online Social Networks

With the wide use of online social networks (OSNs), the problem of data privacy has attracted a lot of attention from not only the research community but also the general public. To meet the privacy needs of OSNs, we present a new framework for protecting information published through online social network websites through encryption by taking into account special features of OSNs. In this framework, autonomous private communities, called as zones, are set up by one or a set of mutually-trusted users collaboratively without any third party intervention. Sensitive information (i.e., posts, photos, etc.) within a zone can only be accessed by authorized members of the zone. A user joins a zone by obtaining a permission from an authorized zone member and uses it along with her private key to access contents inside the zone. One striking feature about our design of permission is that it is not secret information and thus can be left in the user's account in the OSN. Compared with prior work, this design of public permission greatly reduces user-side overhead on secret key management as a user only needs to maintain one secret key and use as many public permissions as she wants to access contents in different zones. Furthermore, our framework allows efficient access permission delegation and revocation. We develop a prototype to evaluate its computation performance in an acceptable level. Meanwhile, we prove that our construction is semantically secure against chosen plaintext attack, existential forgery attack and key forgery attack.

Science Communication and Online Social Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Science Communication and Online Social Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Building Customer Engagement and Brand Loyalty through Online Social Media: An Exploratory Study

Building and sustaining brand loyalty are one of the fundamental subjects of research for strategists and marketers for ages. Online social media has come in forefront to support it in recent times. The objective of the current study was to examine the relationships among online social media, customer engagement and brand loyalty. The study model was estimated by using higher order structural equation modelling with IBS AMOS 21.0. The results of our study demonstrated that online social media is an important predictor of customer engagement and has significant direct impact on customer engagement. Further results confirmed direct impact of customer engagement on brand loyalty. We also found significant difference across the level of customer engagement with reference to gender. This study concluded that the use of Facebook as online social media to connect and engage with customers leads to building brand loyalty. The primary data comprised of 167 respondents.

Decay Characteristics of User Dynamics in Online Social Networks

Users' interests in trends and news that are attracting attention on social media are generally not retained for a long time but decrease with time. The activity dynamics, such as the gradual fading of interests of users in the social network, have been described as the damped oscillation model in previous studies. Previous studies assumed a damping coefficient (which expresses the strength of damping of the oscillation) as a constant independent of the frequency, but it is known that the damping coefficient in the general oscillation phenomena depends on the frequency. In this study, we define two matrices (the Laplacian matrix and its square root matrix) which give the social network structure and consider possible characteristics of the decay rate that can be derived from natural assumptions concerning the network structure.

Trust Computation in Online Social Networks Using Co-Citation and Transpose Trust Propagation

Evaluating trust and distrust between users in online social networks is an important research problem. To address this problem, we provide a method for estimating continuous trust /distrust value between unconnected users. Our method is based on co-citation and transpose trust propagation. We determine on average how differently two users trust or are trusted by other users, and how differently a user trusts another user from how it is trusted by that user. Using these differences, we estimate four partial trust estimates and compute the final trust value from trustor to trustee as the weighted average of these partial estimates. We propose a basic framework that maximizes accuracy, robustness and coverage and show how we can further improve the accuracy at a lower coverage. We perform experiments on real world trust related networks that show that our proposed method outperforms recent state of the art trust computation methods in terms of accuracy and robustness on commonly used datasets.

Analysis of Predicting Trust in Complex Online Social Networks

Humans are utilizing one of the biggest networks of social communication by the web, the development of internet gives a way to the rise of the Online social network that assists users to communicate and accommodate between the users, thus sharing and conveying their emotions and information in an online social network. As users in the online social network are growing and performing several activities, they want trusted users or sources. Trusted users or source of information is one of the primary requirements due to security and privacy of the information. Finding future trusted user is called trust prediction. Several tools are available for predicting trust between users in an online social network. The main aim of trust prediction is to find the trust association between the users in the online social network. In the following study, researchers have at reviewed the diverse trusted-link prediction techniques and evaluated them on the basis of the provided standard dataset provided to us

Multi-Topic Misinformation Blocking With Budget Constraint on Online Social Networks

Along with the development of Information Technology, Online Social Networks (OSN) are constantly developing and have become popular media in the world. Besides communication enhancement benefits, OSN have such limitations on rapid spread of false information as rumors, fake news, and contradictory news. False information spread is collectively referred to as misinformation which has significant on social communities. The more sources and topics of misinformation are, the greater the number of users are affected. Therefore, it is necessary to prevent the spread of misinformation with multiple topics within a given period of time. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Topics Linear Threshold model for misinformation diffusion, and define a misinformation blocking problem based on this model that takes account of multiple topics and budget constraint. The problem is to find a set of nodes that minimizes the impact of misinformation at an allowed cost when blocking them from the network. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and the time complexity of the objective function calculation is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\#P$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -hard. We also prove that the objective function is monotone and submodular. We propose an approximation algorithm with approximation ratio <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(1-1/\sqrt {e})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> based on these attributes. For large networks, we propose an extended algorithm by using a tree data structure for quickly updating and calculating the objective function. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets show efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithms in comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms.

The Influence of Online Social Interaction on Internet Addiction Among Adolescence

Internet addiction is a serious problem affecting individuals of all ages. There are many reasons for internet addiction. One of these reasons is online social interaction. Online social interaction on the internet is the strongest and most common activity that makes adolescents dependent on the internet. Social interaction online facilitate the need to make friends and the need to obtain a personal achievement. Therefore, individuals spend a long time on the Internet. This study aims to determine the effect of online social interaction on internet addiction in adolescents. This research was conducted in the Purbalingga / Indonesia district. The study was conducted with 70 adolescents aged 15-18 years. As data collection tool, Internet Addiction Questionnaire and Online Social Interaction Questionnaire have been used. To test whether the data shows normal distribution, Kolmogorov Smirnov Normality Test was performed. The results of the test showed that the data obtained in the study showed normal distribution. Regression Analysis were used in the study. The research findings show that online social interaction has an effect on internet addiction (R2=0.351; p&amp;lt;0.05). The Regression Analysis applied indicated that online social interaction explain 35.1% of the total variance in internet addiction. According to the results of the study, online social interaction needs to be reduced in order to reduce internet addiction in adolescents. Even so, internet addiction is not only caused by online social interaction, but there are 64.9% of other factors that influence it.

Online and Offline Social Capital of Adolescents Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

Online and Offline Social Capital of Adolescents Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

Transgender Adolescents' Uses of Social Media for Social Support

PurposeTransgender adolescents are at higher risk for negative mental health outcomes, such as depression, anxiety, and suicidality, compared with cisgender adolescents. Social media may be an effective venue for addressing these health disparities because most adolescents have access to online information and socialization. This study used qualitative inquiry to explore transgender adolescents' uses of social media for social support. MethodsTransgender adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18 years with a social media profile were recruited from a pediatric gender clinic in the Midwestern U.S. A 30- to 60-minute semistructured interview assessed ways participants used social media to access transgender-related support. Thematic analysis was used to develop categories and code the transcripts. Coding discrepancies were resolved by two researchers following initial coding. ResultsResults represent data from 25 interviews comprising 13 transmasculine, 11 transfeminine, and one nonbinary participant(s), with 68% of the sample identifying as white, non-Hispanic. Categories emerged regarding forms of support participants received from transgender-related online communities including emotional support through peers and role models, appraisal support for validating their experiences, and informational support for navigating health decisions and educating family and friends. Participants also referenced negative experiences, including harassment and exclusionary behavior online. ConclusionsSocial media platforms represent hubs of community for transgender adolescents. These communities provide emotional, appraisal, and informational support that transgender youth may not otherwise be able to access. Future research should use the affordances of social media to identify approaches to addressing health disparities and improving the well-being of transgender adolescents.

Exploring the Impacts of Webquests on Developing Persuasive Writing Skills, Online Social Presence, and Sense of Belonging among ESP Majors

The current study explores of the impacts of WebQuests on developing persuasive writing skills. It also aims to assess the actual impacts of the online learning environment on developing online social presence of university students in online learning environments, and sense of belonging among ESP majors. Participants in the study were 72 ESP majors in the College of Management Sciences (CMS), Sadat Academy for Management Sciences (SAMS) in both braches of Alexandria and Tanta; 43 students in the experimental group, and 29 students in the control group. Instruments used in the study include: persuasive writing skills test, Online Social Presence Scale, and Hoffman Sense of Belonging Scale (HSBS). Sequential exploratory mixed research method was used for its appropriacy to the nature of the study. Findings of the study revealed positive impacts on enhancing persuasive writing skills. It is also shown that using this online environment helps learners to improve ESP majors' online social presence. In addition, online social presence and involvement in online learning environment lead to enhancing sense of belonging among ESP majors.

Análisis factorial de un modelo de socialización y confianza en la dependencia de Internet en estudiantes de secundaria

El estudio evalúa la validez y confiabilidad de un modelo estructural restringido en el que confluyen los factores de socialización en línea, confianza y dependencia de Internet en jóvenes de secundaria. La finalidad práctica es explicar la coherencia y pertinencia de los factores que integran el modelo teórico por medio de un análisis de regresiones múltiples y de correlaciones. La muestra la constituyen 4,563 jóvenes de secundarias públicas en México. El análisis factorial reveló que los factores de socialización en línea y confianza afectan directa e indirectamente al factor de dependencia de Internet en los adolescentes, ajustándose de este modo al modelo teórico planteado. Los resultados de las pruebas de las correlaciones mostraron una validez convergente y coeficientes estructurales altos y significativos. Los resultados presentados indican que existe una dependencia de Internet en los jóvenes de secundaria que deviene de sus procesos de sociabilidad, no sólo con sus pares y familiares, sino también con personas desconocidas –como se expone en el modelo probado.

Modelo del software multimedia Teotihuacán en el tiempo basado en el diseño instruccional: e-actividades

The development of the multimedia model for the project: Teotihuacán on the time 2009-2019, aims to raise awareness of the damage suffered by the remains. Three factors that drastically affect this cultural heritage are being studied: mass tourism, climate change and tourist attractions within the archeological zone. The methodology for the implementation of the project is the software engineering prototype model that consists of five stages, the current status is stage three: design and construction. An instrument was applied to the inhabitants of the Teotihuacán Valley to probe the feasibility of implementing this multimedia in one of the museums of the archaeological zone, among the most outstanding results it was obtained that they have scarcely lived a multimedia experience within the facilities, for Therefore, the surveyed users consider that this development should raise awareness among both tourism and the population about the damage to the archaeological zone. Finally, the study revealed that software for this purpose is important. Subsequently, the instructional design e-activities specified in each of its phases was developed, such as access and motivation, online socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction and development.

A Pilot Study on the Impact of Facebook on Perceptions of Police Force

The legal authorities, particularly the police force, have been increasingly facing challenges given the popularity of social media [1, 2]. However, we know very little about how public perceptions of the police are being shaped by social media. In this context, this study attempted to investigate the impact of social media on young people’s perceptions of the police in Hong Kong. The focus of this study was placed on Facebook since it was one of the most popular social media platforms in the city. Facebook was not only conceptualized as a communication medium but also a social networking arena. In this connection, qualitative individual interviews were conducted to explore the online social networking on Facebook and its relation to the perceptions of police force. It was found that the Facebook users who were more likely to stay closely connected with other users with similar views would tend to form the politicized perception of police force. On the other hand, the Facebook users who were to be networked with some other users or real persons with dissimilar views would hold more neutral perceptions of the police. This study was the first of its kind to investigate the role of online social networking in the perceptions of the police, thus filling an important gap in our knowledge of the increasing impact of social media. Therefore, the results of current study were expected to contribute to society by avoiding the disproportionate public discourse about law and order. Keywords: Social Media, Online Social Networking, Public Perception, Police Force.