online social networks dissertation

Understanding and Defending Against Malicious Identities in Online Social Networks

Journal Title

Journal issn, volume title, repository usage stats.

Serving more than one billion users around the world, today's online

social networks (OSNs) pervade our everyday life and change the way people

connect and communicate with each other. However, the open nature of

OSNs attracts a constant interest in attacking and exploiting them.

In particular, they are vulnerable to various attacks launched through

malicious accounts, including fake accounts and compromised real user

accounts. In those attacks, malicious accounts are used to send out

spam, spread malware, distort online voting, etc.

In this dissertation, we present practical systems that we have designed

and built to help OSNs effectively throttle malicious accounts. The overarching

contribution of this dissertation is the approaches that leverage the fundamental

weaknesses of attackers to defeat them. We have explored defense schemes along

two dimensions of an attacker's weaknesses: limited social relationships

and strict economic constraints.

The first part of this dissertation focuses on how to leverage social

relationship constraints to detect fake accounts. We present SybilRank, a novel

social-graph-based detection scheme that can scale up to OSNs with billions of

users. SybilRank is based on the observation that the social connections between

fake accounts and real users, called attack edges, are limited. It formulates

the detection as scalable user ranking according to the landing probability of

early-terminated random walks on the social graph. SybilRank generates an informative

user-ranked list with a substantial fraction of fake accounts at the bottom,

and bounds the number of fake accounts that are ranked higher than legitimate

users to O(log n) per attack edge, where n is the total number of users. We have

demonstrated the scalability of SybilRank via a prototype on Hadoop MapReduce,

and its effectiveness in the real world through a live deployment at Tuenti,

the largest OSN in Spain.

The second part of this dissertation focuses on how to exploit an attacker's

economic constraints to uncover malicious accounts. We present SynchroTrap, a system

that uncovers large groups of active malicious accounts, including both fake

accounts and compromised accounts, by detecting their loosely synchronized actions.

The design of SynchroTrap is based on the observation that malicious accounts usually

perform loosely synchronized actions to accomplish an attack mission, due to

limited budgets, specific mission goals, etc. SynchroTrap transforms the detection

into a scalable clustering algorithm. It uncovers large groups of accounts

that act similarly at around the same time for a sustained period of time. To

handle the enormous volume of user action data in large OSNs, we designed SynchroTrap

as an incremental processing system that processes small data chunks on a daily

basis but aggregates the computational results over the continuous data stream.

We implemented SynchroTrap on Hadoop and Giraph, and we deployed it on Facebook

and Instagram. This deployment has resulted in the unveiling of millions of malicious

accounts and thousands of large attack campaigns per month.

Description

Cao, Qiang (2014). Understanding and Defending Against Malicious Identities in Online Social Networks . Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9031 .

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Dukes student scholarship is made available to the public using a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-commercial / No derivative (CC-BY-NC-ND) license .

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Digital Commons @ USF > Office of Graduate Studies > USF Graduate Theses and Dissertations > USF Tampa Theses and Dissertations > 5967

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Content abuse and privacy concerns in online social networks.

Md Imrul Kayes , University of South Florida Follow

Graduation Year

Document type.

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Computer Science and Engineering

Major Professor

Adriana Iamnitchi, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Swaroop Ghosh, Ph.D.

Yao Liu, Ph.D.

John Skvoretz, Ph.D.

Kingsley A. Reeves, Jr., Ph.D.

Community Question Answering, Crowdsourcing, User Behavior, Cross-cultural Variations, Contextual Integrity

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have seen an exponential growth over the last decade, with Facebook having more than 1.49 billion monthly active users and Twitter having 135,000 new users signing up every day as of 2015. Users are sharing 70 million photos per day on the Instagram photo-sharing network. Yahoo Answers question-answering community has more than 1 billion posted answers. The meteoric rise in popularity has made OSNs important social platforms for computer-mediated communications and embedded themselves into society’s daily life, with direct consequences to the offline world and activities. OSNs are built on a foundation of trust, where users connect to other users with common interests or overlapping personal trajectories. They leverage real-world social relationships and/or common preferences, and enable users to communicate online by providing them with a variety of interaction mechanisms.

This dissertation studies abuse and privacy in online social networks. More specifically, we look at two issues: (1) the content abusers in the community question answering (CQA) social network and, (2) the privacy risks that comes from the default permissive privacy settings of the OSNs. Abusive users have negative consequences for the community and its users, as they decrease the community’s cohesion, performance, and participation. We investigate the reporting of 10 million editorially curated abuse reports from 1.5 million users in Yahoo Answers, one of the oldest, largest, and most popular CQA platforms. We characterize the contribution and position of the content abusers in Yahoo Answers social networks. Based on our empirical observations, we build machine learning models to predict such users.

Users not only face the risk of exposing themselves to abusive users or content, but also face leakage risks of their personal information due to weak and permissive default privacy policies. We study the relationship between users’ privacy concerns and their engagement in Yahoo Answers social networks. We find privacy-concerned users have higher qualitative and quantitative contributions, show higher retention, report more abuses, have higher perception on answer quality and have larger social circles. Next, we look at users’ privacy concerns, abusive behavior, and engagement through the lenses of national cultures and discover cross-cultural variations in CQA social networks.

However, our study in Yahoo Answers reveals that the majority of users (about 87%) do not change the default privacy policies. Moreover, we find a similar story in a different type of social network (blogging): 92% bloggers’ do not change their default privacy settings. These results on default privacy are consistent with general-purpose social networks (such as Facebook) and warn about the importance of user-protecting default privacy settings.

We model and implement default privacy as contextual integrity in OSNs. We present a privacy framework, Aegis, and provide a reference implementation. Aegis models expected privacy as contextual integrity using semantic web tools and focuses on defining default privacy policies. Finally, this dissertation presents a comprehensive overview of the privacy and security attacks in the online social networks projecting them in two directions: attacks that exploit users’ personal information and declared social relationships for unintended purposes; and attacks that are aimed at the OSN service provider itself, by threatening its core business.

Scholar Commons Citation

Kayes, Md Imrul, "Content Abuse and Privacy Concerns in Online Social Networks" (2015). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/5967

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Satisfaction with online/in-person social interactions and psychological well-being: The mediating role of social connectedness

• Published: 31 July 2023
• Volume 43 , pages 8678–8687, ( 2024 )

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• Israel Abebe 1 ,
• Yu-Wei Wang 1 ,
• Seini O’Connor 2 ,
• Tiana E. Cruz 1 ,
• Brian T. Keum 3 &
• Munjireen Sifat 4  

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There are various interpersonal interaction modalities in this current digital age, such as social media networks. The literature on the effects of social media on health and well-being indicators is saturated with studies that primarily focus on the frequency of social media use or amount of time spent on social media, neither of which captures the quality of social interactions. To address this gap in the literature, the present study aimed to (a) measure satisfaction with social interactions—for both social media and in-person interactions—and examine its links to indices of mental health (distress, anxiety, depression, anger, and loneliness), and (b) test one’s sense of social connectedness as the mediator in the relation between satisfaction with social interactions and psychological well-being. Data were collected through a web-based survey that was administered to 2,782 incoming undergraduate students. The results showed that, after controlling for gender and race, both satisfaction with social interactions through social media and with in-person interactions were significantly and inversely related to self-reports of distress, anxiety, depression, anger, and loneliness. In addition, the findings from robust mediation tests indicated that social connectedness mediated the path between satisfaction with social interactions and the indices of well-being, and the indirect effects were all significant. The study contributed to our understanding of how satisfaction with interpersonal interactions—digitally or in-person—can impact psychological well-being directly and indirectly, with important implications for students, educators, and practitioners.

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Abebe, I., Wang, YW., O’Connor, S. et al. Satisfaction with online/in-person social interactions and psychological well-being: The mediating role of social connectedness. Curr Psychol 43 , 8678–8687 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04870-0

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04870-0

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Home > TMC > DISSERTATIONS > The Role of Online Social Networking on Deliberate Self-Harm and Suicidality in Adolescents: A Systematized Review of Literature

The Role of Online Social Networking on Deliberate Self-Harm and Suicidality in Adolescents: A Systematized Review of Literature

Aksha M Memon , The University of Texas School of Public Health

In the past ten years the use of social media by minors has significantly increased. Social media use has been linked to depression, which is a major risk factor for suicidality. Social media also provides a platform for cyberbullying, which leads to depression and suicidal behavior in both the victim and perpetrator of bullying. As per CDC statistics, age-adjusted suicide rates have steadily increased over the past ten years in the United States with suicide being the second most common cause of death in the adolescent age group. Hence, the increase in suicide rate parallels the increase in social media use. Additionally, non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is prevalent with rates ranging between 14–21% among youth and young adults. Research findings suggest that self-injuring youth are more active on online social networks than their peers who do not engage in self-injurious behavior. NSSI are also a risk factor for suicide attempts and suicidal deaths. Thus, it was decided to further investigate the role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents with a focus on negative influence by conducting a systematized review of empirical literature. A detailed literature search on 'PubMed' yielded 8 articles satisfying the predefined inclusion/exclusion criteria out of total 1364 articles generated using a combination of MeSH search terms. Data extraction was subsequently performed on these 8 research articles. It was found that social networking websites are utilized by suicidal and self-harming youth as a medium to communicate with and seek social support from other social media users facing similar mental health challenges. Overall, online social networking leads to an increased exposure to and engagement in self-harm behavior due to users receiving negative messages promoting such behavior, emulating self-injurious behavior of others, and adopting self-harm practices from self-harm videos shared online. Moreover, youth who spend greater time on online social networks experienced higher psychological distress, unmet need for mental health support, poor self-rated mental health, and increased suicidal ideation. In conclusion, greater time spent on online social networking promotes self-harm behavior and suicidal ideation in a vulnerable adolescent population.

Subject Area

Mental health|Social psychology|Web Studies|Mass communications

Recommended Citation

Memon, Aksha M, "The Role of Online Social Networking on Deliberate Self-Harm and Suicidality in Adolescents: A Systematized Review of Literature" (2017). Texas Medical Center Dissertations (via ProQuest) . AAI10640641. https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/dissertations/AAI10640641

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Measurement of Online Social Networks DISSERTATION

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How to Use Social Media Networks for Dissertation Research

Published by Owen Ingram at January 27th, 2023 , Revised On October 10, 2023

Social media has taken over our lives. We spend hours on social networking websites such as LinkedIn,  Twitter,   Facebook ,  Instagram ,  Snapchat , and other social networking websites on a daily basis.

Even though these platforms are usually used for fun, recreation, and exchange of information, they can be used for academic purposes as well.

Social media and academic performance can be positively linked to each other if students can learn to use social networking websites for  dissertation research and  academic assignments .

When we spend time on various social media websites, we not only learn about our friends, families, peers or colleagues, but we are also able to gather a lot of information about different topics.

For example, pages on Facebook will alert you to a new message about the  news of technological advances  in your subject of interest so you are always up to date with the latest issues and information.

If you are a social media addict and working on a dissertation project at the same time then it would be wise to learn how to use Social Networks for your Dissertation.

If your  dissertation is to based on quantitative and qualitative data , using social media websites to access participants and gather data from them can be made a part of the chosen research design .

Here are a few ways through which you can make use of online social networks for gathering data and conducting your research:

Create/Join Relevant Groups and Pages

Social media websites provide a great opportunity to join groups and pages that are relevant to your field of research. For instance, if your research is related to human resources, you can join a Facebook group that shares information about the latest trends and news related to your academic subject.

Many of the members of that particular group could be students and/professionals in the field of human resources and so you will be able to collect data for your research from them as part of your research.

Many of your contacts and friends might also be interested in exchange for information in your area of research. Approaching them through a social media group will help you approach them and collect data for your own dissertation.

Need  help with statistical analysis  on STATA, SPSS or Excel? Our writers can analyse your data, create graphs, establish relationships between different variables so you can make a great impression the readers. Learn more about  our dissertation services .

Create an Online Survey

If you’ve chosen  primary research for your dissertation , and are looking to collect primary data from a large sample size, creating an online survey and posting its link on social media can help you collect large sets of data for your dissertation in a short period time.

Survey Monkey is a popular platform through which you can create your survey, and post the link on your social media wall. Ask your friends and peers to fill the survey.

If your dissertation survey/questionnaire needs to be filled only by a certain age group or a specific gender, mention the same when posting the link of your survey. The best part? You can get a lot of surveys/questionnaires filled sitting at home, within no time.

There are a number of other websites and online survey platforms similar to  Survey Monkey . Find out about them, create and post your surveys online and save time!

Create free online Surveys.   Click Here.

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Meet and Interact with Professionals

Social networking platforms such as LinkedIn can help you connect with professionals and so it is an excellent way of using social media networks for dissertation research.

If your research requires you to meet and interact with professionals from a specific industry, you can do so by networking on this amazing social media platform.

Collecting data for your dissertation on social networking sites such as Linkedin helps you; save your valuable time and set up meetings with industry professionals without having to dedicate financial resources to schedule and attend the meeting in person.

Apart from LinkedIn, you can also get in touch with professionals through Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The impact of social media websites on society is increasing with each passing day so much so that you can send a private message to the person you wish to interview or collect information from for free or a small fee.

All you have to do is let them know why you’re contacting them so that they’re aware of the situation. You can also send a message to the company’s official account or page, and their social media team will get in touch with you.

But, remember! You must be able to explain why connecting with the company or brand representative will aid you in your quest for data collection and analysis .

If you are struggling with data collection for your dissertation project, rest assured you are not the only one!. There is no need to panic! ResearchProspect writers have helped thousands of students with  data collection , statistical analysis , and more.

Collect Data with a Status Update

The effect of social media on students is usually seen as negative but you can also use social media websites for dissertation research and for data collection for your dissertation paper. Students can post questions and gather responses using their social media accounts.

For example, if you are researching gender roles in the human resource department or looking at the ratio of male-female, you can simply post a question on your social media account on Facebook, Instagram, and others ‘how many of you work in HR?’

Responses to this question will provide an insight into the real picture of the actual scenario. Collecting data for a dissertation with a social media status update is easy and time-saving; however, students should be able to differentiate between actual and fake responses. Not being able to do so will make their research results slightly unauthentic.

Seek and Receive Help Instantly

Phone calls, text messages and face to face meetings are time-consuming and difficult to arrange in today’s fast-paced world. In contrast to these conventional methods, social media allows you to interact with others in a jiffy.

So whenever you find yourself stuck with something related to your dissertation, you can seek instant help from your contacts on social media platforms.

Reach out to your friends and peers through any social networking website and discuss your queries related to any aspect of the dissertation. It is highly likely that you will find an answer to your  question  in the shortest possible time.

You can also get in touch with us for your dissertation if you’re still unsure how to use social media networks for your dissertation. ResearchProspect’s  dissertation writing services  will help you get over all your research related worries. Our highly qualified team of writers choose the right research strategy for your dissertation, and deliver nothing short of best!

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Frequently Asked Questions

How social media platforms can help in writing a dissertation.

Social media platforms facilitate dissertation research through access to diverse academic resources, networking with experts, and gathering real-time data for a well-rounded study.

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