Credibility Assessment of Mobile Social Networking Users Based on Relationship and Information Interactions: Evidence from China

Abstract

Personalized, diversified and decentralized mobile social networking platforms provide users with an environment for accessing, sharing, distributing information and communicating emotionally. In this virtual social space, effective identification of trusted nodes can assist social networking users to make interactive strategies, and provide enterprises with scientific basis for the social interactive marketing decisions. Therefore, trust assessment plays a crucial role in establishing social connections among mobile social networking users. In this paper, based on the social relationship and information interactive data between the users of Sina Weibo, four factors, the intensity of social relations, the sphere of social influence, the information value and the control of information transmission are taken into account to build the trust assessment model. Secondly, the trust between users is quantified by node credibility and entropy weight method is employed to calculate the four factors' contribution to the node credibility respectively. Finally, the credibility of each node in Sina Weibo is calculated to identify the trusted nodes.