The role of trusted relationships on content spread in distributed online social networks

Abstract

In Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSN) content spread will largely depend upon trust relationships between users, who are likely to allocate resources only to help spreading content coming from peers with whom they have a strong enough relationship. This could lead to the formation of isolated groups of intimates in the network, and to the lack of a big enough connected component, essential for the diffusion of information. In this paper we simulate the outcome of such restrictions by using a large-scale Facebook data set, from which we estimate the trust level between friends. We then simulate content spread on the same network assuming that no central control exists, and that social friendship links exist only above certain levels of trust. The results show that limiting the network to “active social contacts” of the users leads to a high node coverage. On the other hand, the coverage drops for more restrictive assumptions. Nevertheless, selecting a single excluded social link for each user and adding the respective node in the network is sufficient to obtain good coverage (i.e. always higher than 40%) also in case of strong restrictions.