Facebook Keeps Dead Friendships Alive, Maybe for the Better
In both this course and INFO 2450 Communication and Technology, we are taught about weak ties and told about their strength, so I wanted to explore the exact effects weak ties have. In this article, De Meo discusses his methods of determining the effect of weak ties on information diffusion. Observations were done on a Facebook network with 957,000 users and compared to equivalent tests done on Erdos-Renyi random graphs. It is difficult to define Granovetter’s weak ties from Facebook since the friendships on Facebook have many nuances to these relationships. For the purposes of this study, weak ties were defined as edges linking individuals belonging to different communities and strong ties were those connecting users in the same community. One test proved that bridges create more and shorter paths, so if a bridge was deleted, it would be much more disruptive than the deletion of a strong tie. Another test formalized the strength of ties with this formula where ki and kj are the degrees of node i and node j and cij is the number of mutual acquaintances.
By gradually deleting ties with lower w values, information coverage dropped sharply. After applying the Independent Cascade Model to simulate information propagation over a network, it was found that the removal of weak ties was much more significant in Facebook’s network rather than in the random network, proving weak ties’ strength in the community.
He concluded that people in OSNs (Online Social Networks) create well-connected communities while weak ties optimize the spread of information. These findings support what we have discussed in lecture and what has been described in the book, that weak ties provide new sources of information and new opportunities. Additionally, De Meo found that individuals tend to aggregate in small communities, which is supported by the properties of triadic closure, cognitive balance, and homophily. Lastly, De Meo found that weak ties outnumber strong ties. The Atlantic article linked below explores how Facebook created the vestigial friendship. Dunbar’s number says that the maximum for close friends is 50, but the average Facebook user has 338 friends. Thus, the majority of ties on Facebook must be weak ties and since weak ties are less similar, people are exposed to newer perspectives. Taking the proof from De Meo’s paper and the insight from the Atlantic article into consideration, Facebook is the place where friendships go to never quite die, but it seems to be for the better since these weak ties allow for a more informed network.
Sources:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1203/1203.0535.pdf
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/15-years-facebook-friendships-wont-die/581824/