Securing trust in online social networks

Abstract

Trust in Online Social Networks (OSN) is a contentious topic. On one hand, there is an increasing reliance on them for trustworthy information and on the other, wariness to believe anything on it. Although the providers of OSNs have tried multiple ways to boost the trustworthiness of the information posted on their websites and weed out millions of fake accounts, the problem is largely unsolved and poses a formidable challenge. This paper examines the problem is some detail, discusses existing solutions to the problem using Machine Learning and other techniques and concludes by discussing some more ideas on enhancing the trustworthiness of the OSNs.