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Social trust: impacts on social influential diffusion

Hock Yeow Yap (Faculty of Science and Technology, Sunway University, Bandar Sunway, Selangor, Malaysia)
Tong-Ming Lim (Faculty of Science and Technology, Sunway University, Bandar Sunway, Selangor, Malaysia)

International Journal of Web Information Systems

ISSN: 1744-0084

Article publication date: 19 June 2017

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to present social trust as a variable of influence by demonstrating the possibilities of trusted social nodes to improve influential capability and rate of successfully influenced social nodes within a social networking environment.

Design/methodology/approach

This research will be conducted using simulated experiments. The base algorithm in research uses genetics algorithm diffusion model (GADM) where it carries out social influence calculations within a social networking environment. The GADM algorithm will be enhanced by integrating trust values into its influential calculations. The experiment simulates a virtual social network based on a social networking site architecture from the data set used to conduct experiments on the enhanced GADM and observe their influence capabilities.

Findings

The presence of social trust can effectively increase the rate of successfully influenced social nodes by factorizing trust value of one source node and acceptance rate of another recipient node into its probabilistic equation, hence increasing the final acceptance probability.

Research limitations/implications

This research focused exclusively on conceptual mathematical models and technical aspects so far; comprehensive user study, extensive performance and scalability testing is left for future work.

Originality/value

Two key contributions of this paper are the calculation of social trust via content integrity and the application of social trust in social influential diffusion algorithms. Two models will be designed, implemented and evaluated on the application of social trust via trusted social nodes and domain-specified (of specific interest groups) trusted social nodes.

Keywords

Citation

Yap, H.Y. and Lim, T.-M. (2017), "Social trust: impacts on social influential diffusion", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 199-219. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-11-2016-0067

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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