Online Social Networks Users Research Articles

Privacy-Preserving and Diversity-Aware Trust-based Team Formation in Online Social Networks

As online social networks (OSNs) become more prevalent, a new paradigm for problem-solving through crowd-sourcing has emerged. By leveraging the OSN platforms, users can post a problem to be solved and then form a team to collaborate and solve the problem. A common concern in OSNs is how to form effective collaborative teams, as various tasks are completed through online collaborative networks. A team’s diversity in expertise has received high attention to producing high team performance in developing team formation (TF) algorithms. However, the effect of team diversity on performance under different types of tasks has not been extensively studied. Another important issue is how to balance the need to preserve individuals’ privacy with the need to maximize performance through active collaboration, as these two goals may conflict with each other. This research has not been actively studied in the literature. In this work, we develop a TF algorithm in the context of OSNs that can maximize team performance and preserve team members’ privacy under different types of tasks. Our proposed PRivAcy-Diversity-Aware TF framework, called PRADA-TF , is based on trust relationships between users in OSNs where trust is measured based on a user’s expertise and privacy preference levels. The PRADA-TF algorithm considers the team members’ domain expertise, privacy preferences, and the team’s expertise diversity in the process of TF. Our approach employs game-theoretic principles Mechanism Design to motivate self-interested individuals within a TF context, positioning the mechanism designer as the pivotal team leader responsible for assembling the team. We use two real-world datasets (i.e., Netscience and IMDb) to generate different semi-synthetic datasets for constructing trust networks using a belief model (i.e., Subjective Logic) and identifying trustworthy users as candidate team members. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed PRADA-TF scheme in four variants against three baseline methods in the literature. Our analysis focuses on three performance metrics for studying OSNs: social welfare, privacy loss, and team diversity.

Ingenuidade e Inércia Cognitiva como Atributos para a Viralização de Fake News nas Redes Sociais Online

The dissemination of fake news on online social networks has created a scenario of disinformation in which manipulation and control are used to influence behavior and gain advantages. This phenomenon has motivated joint efforts to inhibit its spread. However, despite these initiatives, the problem persists. The assumption is that users of these channels, who are key agents in confronting this phenomenon, become contributors to disinformation when affected by naivety or cognitive inertia. The aim is to analyze the role of these users in the spread of fake news and identify factors that influence their uncritical stance. Conducted through a narrative review of the literature for theoretical purposes, this analysis adopts a reflective, exploratory and essayistic approach to the condition of co-participants of online social network users in the face of the problem of fake news, based on key themes such as post-truth and critical information competence, and illustrated by an empirical analysis of three specific cases of viral fake news. It is concluded that users of online social networks, when naive and inert, are part of the problem and, therefore, need to be more reactive, instead of, consciously or unconsciously, becoming agents of misinformation.

Stance Detection in the Context of Fake News—A New Approach

Online social networks (OSNs) are inundated with an enormous daily influx of news shared by users worldwide. Information can originate from any OSN user and quickly spread, making the task of fact-checking news both time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address this challenge, researchers are exploring machine learning techniques to automate fake news detection. This paper specifically focuses on detecting the stance of content producers—whether they support or oppose the subject of the content. Our study aims to develop and evaluate advanced text-mining models that leverage pre-trained language models enhanced with meta features derived from headlines and article bodies. We sought to determine whether incorporating the cosine distance feature could improve model prediction accuracy. After analyzing and assessing several previous competition entries, we identified three key tasks for achieving high accuracy: (1) a multi-stage approach that integrates classical and neural network classifiers, (2) the extraction of additional text-based meta features from headline and article body columns, and (3) the utilization of recent pre-trained embeddings and transformer models.

Political social media bot detection: Unveiling cutting-edge feature selection and engineering strategies in machine learning model development

Over time, social media bots (SMBs), specifically political SMBs, have played a crucial role in influencing and spreading misinformation, manipulating public opinion, and harassing and intimidating users of online social networks (OSNs). This article aims to study previous works on the detection and analysis of political SMB activities and address critical challenges that significantly impact the effectiveness of SMB detection models. These challenges include feature engineering, feature selection (FS), and model implementation. Over 33 features were extracted from the Twibot-20 dataset, including content, user information, network, behavior, and temporal features. Various FS techniques are explored and compared to select the optimal features, comprising basic, filter, wrapper, embedded, and hybrid. The optimal features are then employed to train multiple machine-learning algorithms. To balance the dataset, the synthetic minority oversampling technique coupled with edited nearest neighbors (Smote-ENN) is used. The results showed an improvement in model performance, from an initial Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 90.40 % and accuracy of 81.60 % using the original set to a score of 99.50 % for the test set and 100 % for the training set in all used metrics. Decision Trees, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Adaboost, XGB, and Extra Trees emerge as the most effective for detecting political SMBs.

Measuring user influence in real-time on twitter using behavioural features

Identifying influential users in online social networks, specifically Twitter, has drawn considerable research interest due to their profound influence on real-world events. Existing studies have primarily focused on topological aspects to identify influential users, which necessitate a complete network structure and ignore the behavioural aspects of the users. However, real-world network structure can be challenging to obtain. Thus, this study presents the BehaviourRank Influence (BRI) method, which focuses on evaluating Twitter user influence by analysing behavioural characteristics instead of traditional network structures. This approach acquires data in real-time to derive six behavioural characteristics by employing new metrics to achieve accurate and uniform characterizations. The proposed metrics are compared to baseline metrics from the literature using a user classification prediction model to validate their predictive ability. It also ranked behavioural characteristics by importance using SHAP and Information Gain approaches. To determine overall influence, a unique Rank-based Exponential Smoothing algorithm is proposed. The findings indicate that most features incorporating proposed measures exhibited superior performance compared to features with baseline metrics across all three datasets. The proposed feature sets achieved accuracy scores of 86.67%, 73.47%, and 85.87% in the respective datasets, while the baselined feature sets attained scores of 64.23%, 63.30%, and 66.30%. Moreover, the Rank-Based influence measurements algorithm provides a detailed and adaptable structure for measuring influence, recognising the significance of feature ranks in capturing the evolving nature of user behaviour.

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.

A Multi-Agent System for Fine-Grained Opinion Dynamics Analysis in Online Social Networks

The influence and dissemination of users’ opinions are the essence of the opinion dynamics in online social networks (OSNs). Understanding the process of users’ opinion formation and propagation can provide better service for public opinion monitoring and product advertising. However, most opinion dynamics research typically do not distinguish between user opinion formation and propagation, instead focusing on the process of mass opinion polarization. This article presents a multiagent system (MAS) to analyze fine-grained opinion dynamics (FOD) by agent-based modeling (ABM). At the macro level, the MAS-FOD system we designed can produce a statistical analysis of public opinion evolution based on different parameter constellations and analyze the changes in personalized agent opinions. At the micro level, the agent-based model is presented to describe the single user in OSNs as an individualized agent in MAS-FOD. Specifically, we propose two mechanisms, agent-based opinion formation (AOF) mechanism and agent-based opinion propagation (AOP) mechanism, for agents to form and disseminate opinions, respectively. Meanwhile, multidimensional social influence features mining from self, local neighbors, and global topic community are defined and used in two mechanisms to train personalized agents to self-adapt to the MAS-FOD system. We demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the MAS-FOD system from two types of experiments: empirical analysis and simulation analysis. The former is driven by empirical social network data to analyze the predictive performance of AOF; the latter simulates the public opinion propagation through the AOP mechanism in the MAS-FOD system. The results demonstrate that: 1) the AOF outperforms SOTA methods in the accuracy of agent opinion prediction; 2) the dissemination effect based on the AOP is more closer to the actual evolution trend of public opinion than the baseline; and 3) the MAS-FOD system can perform fine-grained analysis of opinion dynamics by adjusting different parameters.

Gender-specific homophily on Instagram and implications on information spread

More and more social interactions happen online. On online social networks such as Instagram, millions of users share, like, and comment on photos and videos every day, interacting with other users world wide, at large scale and at a high rate. These networks do not only introduce new user experiences, but they also enable new insights into human behavior. Here, we use these new possibilities to study homophilic behavior—the tendency of individuals to bond with people similar to themselves. While homophilic behavior has been observed in many contexts, little is known about gender-specific differences and the extent of homophilic behavior of female and male users in online social networks. Based on a unique and extensive data set, covering over 800,000 (directed) Instagram interactions and a time span of three years, we shed light on differences between genders and uncover an intriguing asymmetry of homophily. In particular, we show that female users exhibit homophily to a larger extent than male users. The magnitude of this asymmetry depends on the type of interaction, as differences are more pronounced for ‘comment’-interactions than for ‘like’-interactions. Given these empirical observations, we further study the implications of such gender differences on the spread of information in social networks in a basic model. We find that on average, a piece of information that originates from a female group reaches significantly more female users than male users.

Contextual Integrity and Personal Health Information Sharing in Online Social Networks

Many online social network (OSN) users exchange health-related information on OSNs to manage their health, obtain support, and offer assistance to others facing similar medical challenges. Nonetheless, OSN users are concerned about the privacy of their health information. Extant studies on online information privacy have largely resorted to a calculus perspective, focusing on the costs and benefits of information exchange with commercial vendors. Such a perspective, however, fails to capture the nuanced flows of personal health information (PHI) on OSNs, which involves more than two parties. To address this gap and further advance the research on information privacy, this paper embraces the theory of contextual integrity to explore the distinctive contextual idiosyncrasies of PHI flow on OSNs. In particular, we examine how context-specific values and norms affect OSN users’ personal privacy norms and their PHI disclosure intentions. Our theory-driven empirical results suggest that contextual values and normative expectations related to technology control, legislation, and peer users collectively influence OSN users’ personal privacy norms. In addition, perceived personal value and perceived altruistic value serve as motivators to promote PHI disclosure intentions, working in tandem with personal privacy norms. The key findings of the study also have important implications for policymakers and OSN providers in the context of OSN-mediated healthcare through (1) advancing our understanding of the complex dynamics of PHI flow on OSNs and (2) designing effective information privacy measures (i.e., policies, technical features, and programs) to uphold contextual integrity and nurture the development of patient-centered healthcare paradigms.

A physics-informed neural network model for social media user growth

<p>In this paper, a physics-informed neural network model is proposed to predict the growth of online social network users. The number of online social network users is modeled by a stochastic process and the associated Kolmogorov forward equation is derived. Then, a physics-informed neural network model is built based on the Kolmogorov forward equation and trained using real-world data. By combining mathematical modeling with machine learning, our approach provides a practical and interpretable methodology that harnesses the strengths of both physical laws and advancements in machine learning, while minimizing the opacity in machine learning models.</p>

An algorithm for next-level connections of users in online social networks

An algorithm for next-level connections of users in online social networks

Diversity Preference-Aware Link Recommendation for Online Social Networks

Link recommendation, such as “People You May Know” on LinkedIn, recommends links to connect unlinked online social network users. Existing link recommendation methods tend to recommend similar friends to a user but overlook the fact that different users have different diversity preferences when making friends in a social network. That is, some users prefer to connect with friends of similar profiles while some others prefer to befriend those of different profiles. For example, Jane prefers to connect with those primarily majoring in mathematics, whereas Jack prefers to befriend those in many different majors. To address this research gap, we define and operationalize the concept of diversity preference and propose a new link recommendation problem: the diversity preference-aware link recommendation problem. We then develop a novel link recommendation method that recommends friends to cater each user’s diversity preference. Our study informs researchers and practitioners about a new perspective on link recommendation – diversity preference-aware link recommendation. Our study also suggests that recommender systems need to be designed to meet each user’s diversity preference rather than indiscriminately increase the diversity of recommended items for every user.

Automating the Temperament Assessment of Online Social Network Users

Automating the Temperament Assessment of Online Social Network Users

How social bots can influence public opinion more effectively: Right connection strategy

The advent of online social networks (OSNs) has facilitated the exchange of opinions and information, but the prevalence of social bots that manipulate opinions through human-like behavior demands attention. In response, we present a novel approach that utilizes a virtual corpus to analyze the impact of social bots on public opinion in OSNs. By developing behavior rules for both bots and human users, we aim to identify optimal strategies for social bots to increase their effectiveness. This work reveals that the success of social bots on OSNs depends on their connectivity strategy to corresponding OSN topologies. We found that simply increasing the number of social bots is not always effective, and dense communication links in target OSNs can dilute the impact of information posted by social bots. As a result, we explored other factors, such as the walking speed of bots in OSNs, to provide rules that inspire the development of smarter and more effective social bots. Our research sheds light on the intricate dynamics between social bots and human users in OSNs and provides valuable insights into social bots’ behaviors, informing effective strategies for their design and deployment.

An Automatic Privacy-Aware Framework for Text Data in Online Social Network Based on a Multi-Deep Learning Model

With the increasing severity of user privacy leaks in online social networks (OSNs), existing privacy protection technologies have difficulty meeting the diverse privacy protection needs of users. Therefore, privacy-aware (PA) for the text data that users post on OSNs has become a current research focus. However, most existing PA algorithms for OSN users only provide the types of privacy disclosures rather than the specific locations of disclosures. Furthermore, although named entity recognition (NER) technology can extract specific locations of privacy text, it has poor recognition performance for nested and interest privacy. To address these issues, this paper proposes a PA framework based on the extraction of OSN privacy information content. The framework can automatically perceive the privacy information shared by users in OSNs and accurately locate which parts of the text are leaking sensitive information. Firstly, we combine the roformerBERT model, BI_LSTM model, and global_pointer algorithm to construct a direct privacy entity recognition (DPER) model for solving the specific privacy location recognition and entity nesting problems. Secondly, we use the roformerBERT model and UniLM framework to construct an interest privacy inference (IPI) model for interest recognition and to generate interpretable text that supports this interest. Finally, we constructed a dataset of 13,000 privacy-containing texts for experimentation. Experimental results show that the overall accuracy of the DPER model can reach 91.80%, while that of the IPI model can reach 98.3%. Simultaneously, we compare the proposed model with recent methods. The analysis of the results indicates that the proposed model exhibits better performance than previous methods.

Privacy Scoring over OSNs: Shared Data Granularity as a Latent Dimension

Privacy scoring aims at measuring the privacy violation risk of a user over an online social network (OSN) based on attribute values shared in the user’s OSN profile page and the user’s position in the network. Existing studies on privacy scoring rely on possibly biased or emotional survey data. In this study, we work with real-world data collected from the professional LinkedIn OSN and show that probabilistic scoring models derived from the item response theory fit real-world data better than naive approaches. We also introduce the granularity of the data an OSN user shares on her profile as a latent dimension of the OSN privacy scoring problem. Incorporating data granularity into our model, we build the most comprehensive solution to the OSN privacy scoring problem. Extensive experimental evaluation of various scoring models indicates the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Dynamics of Opinion Polarization

For decades, researchers have been trying to understand how people form their opinions. This quest has become even more pressing with the widespread usage of online social networks and social media, which seem to amplify the already existing phenomenon of polarization. In this work, we study the problem of polarization assuming that opinions evolve according to the popular Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) model. The FJ model is one of the few existing opinion dynamics models that has been validated on small/medium-sized social groups. First, we carry out a comprehensive survey of the FJ model in the literature (distinguishing its main variants) and of the many polarization metrics available, deriving an invariant relation among them. Secondly, we derive the conditions under which the FJ variants are able to induce opinion polarization in a social network, as a function of the social ties between the nodes and their individual susceptibility to the opinion of others. Thirdly, we discuss a methodology for finding concrete opinion vectors that are able to bring the network to a polarized state. Finally, our analytical results are applied to two real social network graphs, showing how our theoretical findings can be used to identify polarizing conditions under various configurations.

Relationship privacy preservation in photo sharing

In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSN) have become popular content-sharing environments. With the emergence of smartphones with high-quality cameras, people like to share photos of their life moments on OSNs. The photos, however, often contain private information that people do not intend to share with others (e.g., their sensitive relationship). Solely relying on OSN users to manually process photos to protect their relationship can be tedious and error-prone. Therefore, we designed a system to automatically discover sensitive relations in a photo to be shared online and preserve the relations by face blocking techniques. We first used the Decision Tree model to learn sensitive relations from the photos labeled private or public by OSN users. Then we defined a face blocking problem to handle the trade-off between preserving relationship privacy and maintaining the photo utility. To cope with the problem, we developed Greedy and Linear Programming based face blocking technologies. In this paper, we generated synthetic data and used it to evaluate our system performance in terms of privacy protection and photo utility loss.

K＋＋ Shell: Influence maximization in multilayer networks using community detection

Selecting influential users in a network is essential to spread information quickly. Identifying influential users is very useful for viral marketing and brand communication. Influence maximization (IM) is selecting a few influential users in the network who can maximize the influence spread. Many existing algorithms address IM in single-layer networks. However, the study of IM in multi-layer networks is gaining importance after the advancement and rapid growth in the usage of online social networks. Studying IM in multi-layer networks in the context of viral marketing will be interesting. Motivated by this, this paper investigates the K＋＋ Shell decomposition algorithm to find the k set of influential nodes (seed nodes) in a multi-layer network. The proposed model prunes the nodes based on degree and assign reward points to their neighbors. We conducted a comparative study of various IM algorithms and reported the results. We observed that the K＋＋ Shell decomposition algorithm outperforms other algorithms on various real-time datasets under various settings and environments.

UHIR: An effective information dissemination model of online social hypernetworks based on user and information attributes

With the expansion of the number of users in online social networks, the diversity of users and community characteristics become more prominent. Hypernetwork theory provides a path for characterizing complex relationships in networks. This paper used hypergraph’s hyperedges to represent the community relationship between users, and created an online social hypernetwork information dissemination model (UHIR model) based on user and information attributes by combining the hypernetwork model with the SEIR model. Through this model, this article simulated and analyzed the dynamic process and laws of information dissemination under different network structures, and studied the influence of user influence, confidence, interest value, and information timeliness of the process. The simulation results show that this model can accurately describe the information dissemination trend and process in the real online social network. This work extends a new research direction of information dissemination in hypernetworks and contributes to the in-depth study of more complex information dissemination mechanisms.