7,716 research outputs found
Analyzing the Facebook Friendship Graph
Online Social Networks (OSN) during last years acquired a\ud
huge and increasing popularity as one of the most important emerging Web phenomena, deeply modifying the behavior of users and contributing to build a solid substrate of connections and relationships among people using the Web. In this preliminary work paper, our purpose is to analyze Facebook, considering a signi�cant sample of data re\ud
ecting relationships among subscribed users. Our goal is to extract, from this platform, relevant information about the distribution of these relations and exploit tools and algorithms provided by the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to discover and, possibly, understand underlying similarities\ud
between the developing of OSN and real-life social networks
Extraction and Analysis of Facebook Friendship Relations
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a unique Web and social phenomenon, affecting tastes and behaviors of their users and helping them to maintain/create friendships. It is interesting to analyze the growth and evolution of Online Social Networks both from the point of view of marketing and other of new services and from a scientific viewpoint, since their structure and evolution may share similarities with real-life social networks. In social sciences, several techniques for analyzing (online) social networks have been developed, to evaluate quantitative properties (e.g., defining metrics and measures of structural characteristics of the networks) or qualitative aspects (e.g., studying the attachment model for the network evolution, the binary trust relationships, and the link prediction problem).\ud
However, OSN analysis poses novel challenges both to Computer and Social scientists. We present our long-term research effort in analyzing Facebook, the largest and arguably most successful OSN today: it gathers more than 500 million users. Access to data about Facebook users and their friendship relations, is restricted; thus, we acquired the necessary information directly from the front-end of the Web site, in order to reconstruct a sub-graph representing anonymous interconnections among a significant subset of users. We describe our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawler for Facebook data extraction. To minimize bias, we adopt two different graph mining techniques: breadth-first search (BFS) and rejection sampling. To analyze the structural properties of samples consisting of millions of nodes, we developed a specific tool for analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of social networks, adopting and improving existing Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques and algorithms
Determination of Friendship Intensity between Online Social Network Users Based on Their Interaction
Online social networks (OSN) are one of the most popular forms of modern
communication and among the best known is Facebook. Information about the
connection between users on the OSN is often very scarce. It's only known if
users are connected, while the intensity of the connection is unknown. The aim
of the research described was to determine and quantify friendship intensity
between OSN users based on analysis of their interaction. We built a
mathematical model, which uses: supervised machine learning algorithm Random
Forest, experimentally determined importance of communication parameters and
coefficients for every interaction parameter based on answers of research
conducted through a survey. Taking user opinion into consideration while
designing a model for calculation of friendship intensity is a novel approach
in opposition to previous researches from literature. Accuracy of the proposed
model was verified on the example of determining a better friend in the offered
pair
Crawling Facebook for Social Network Analysis Purposes
We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree distribution, centrality measures, scaling laws and distribution of friendship.\u
Towards Psychometrics-based Friend Recommendations in Social Networking Services
Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social
profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph,
containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking
Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new
contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social
graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring
personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an
extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. This will
support the development of highly distributed Social Networking Services
without central knowledge of the social graph.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 International Conference on AI &
Mobile Services (IEEE AIMS
Exploratory Analysis of Pairwise Interactions in Online Social Networks
In the last few decades sociologists were trying to explain human behaviour
by analysing social networks, which requires access to data about interpersonal
relationships. This represented a big obstacle in this research field until the
emergence of online social networks (OSNs), which vastly facilitated the
process of collecting such data. Nowadays, by crawling public profiles on OSNs,
it is possible to build a social graph where "friends" on OSN become
represented as connected nodes. OSN connection does not necessarily indicate a
close real-life relationship, but using OSN interaction records may reveal
real-life relationship intensities, a topic which inspired a number of recent
researches. Still, published research currently lacks an extensive exploratory
analysis of OSN interaction records, i.e. a comprehensive overview of users'
interaction via different ways of OSN interaction. In this paper we provide
such an overview by leveraging results of conducted extensive social experiment
which managed to collect records for over 3,200 Facebook users interacting with
over 1,400,000 of their friends. Our exploratory analysis focuses on extracting
population distributions and correlation parameters for 13 interaction
parameters, providing valuable insight in online social network interaction for
future researches aimed at this field of study.Comment: Journal Article published 2 Oct 2017 in Automatika volume 58 issue 4
on pages 422 to 42
Preserving Link Privacy in Social Network Based Systems
A growing body of research leverages social network based trust relationships
to improve the functionality of the system. However, these systems expose
users' trust relationships, which is considered sensitive information in
today's society, to an adversary.
In this work, we make the following contributions. First, we propose an
algorithm that perturbs the structure of a social graph in order to provide
link privacy, at the cost of slight reduction in the utility of the social
graph. Second we define general metrics for characterizing the utility and
privacy of perturbed graphs. Third, we evaluate the utility and privacy of our
proposed algorithm using real world social graphs. Finally, we demonstrate the
applicability of our perturbation algorithm on a broad range of secure systems,
including Sybil defenses and secure routing.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure
Measuring, Characterizing, and Detecting Facebook Like Farms
Social networks offer convenient ways to seamlessly reach out to large
audiences. In particular, Facebook pages are increasingly used by businesses,
brands, and organizations to connect with multitudes of users worldwide. As the
number of likes of a page has become a de-facto measure of its popularity and
profitability, an underground market of services artificially inflating page
likes, aka like farms, has emerged alongside Facebook's official targeted
advertising platform. Nonetheless, there is little work that systematically
analyzes Facebook pages' promotion methods. Aiming to fill this gap, we present
a honeypot-based comparative measurement study of page likes garnered via
Facebook advertising and from popular like farms. First, we analyze likes based
on demographic, temporal, and social characteristics, and find that some farms
seem to be operated by bots and do not really try to hide the nature of their
operations, while others follow a stealthier approach, mimicking regular users'
behavior. Next, we look at fraud detection algorithms currently deployed by
Facebook and show that they do not work well to detect stealthy farms which
spread likes over longer timespans and like popular pages to mimic regular
users. To overcome their limitations, we investigate the feasibility of
timeline-based detection of like farm accounts, focusing on characterizing
content generated by Facebook accounts on their timelines as an indicator of
genuine versus fake social activity. We analyze a range of features, grouped
into two main categories: lexical and non-lexical. We find that like farm
accounts tend to re-share content, use fewer words and poorer vocabulary, and
more often generate duplicate comments and likes compared to normal users.
Using relevant lexical and non-lexical features, we build a classifier to
detect like farms accounts that achieves precision higher than 99% and 93%
recall.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS
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