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Predicting tie strength with social media

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Social media treats all users the same: trusted friend or total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the theme of tie strength. Our work bridges this gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties with over 85% accuracy. We complement these quantitative findings with interviews that unpack the relationships we could not predict. The paper concludes by illustrating how modeling tie strength can improve social media design elements, including privacy controls, message routing, friend introductions and information prioritization.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2009
2426 pages
ISBN:9781605582467
DOI:10.1145/1518701
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. relationship modeling
  2. sns
  3. social media
  4. social networks
  5. tie strength
  6. ties

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CHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,130 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Content and link Analysis of a Moroccan entrepreneurs group2024 International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Computer Vision (ISCV)10.1109/ISCV60512.2024.10620109(1-8)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • (2024)How tie strength influences purchasing intention in social recommendation: evidence from behavioral model and brain activityInternet Research10.1108/INTR-06-2023-0506Online publication date: 13-Feb-2024
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  • (2024)A Fuzzy-Based System for Assessment of Tie Strength in Online Social NetworksAdvances on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing10.1007/978-3-031-76462-2_12(133-141)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2024
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