The role of strong and weak ties in Facebook: a community structure perspective

Social dynamics explaining communication among individuals and social relationships represent a major field of investigation in the current scenario of online social network research, whose importance and impact in everyday life is growing at unprecedented rate. This work reports our quantitative assessment of so-called strength of weak ties theory, foreseen by Granovetter’s seminal studies, applied to well-known Facebook social graph. We characterize the features of weak/strong ties considering the community structure of this network, studying a sample available in literature containing millions of users and their social relationships: after discovering the communities of aggregation among users, we classify ties according to the original Granovetter’s, and study the statistical features of such ties, discovering clearly emerging organization patterns. These findings imply that individuals in large-scale networks organize so that to create well-connected communities in which weak ties play a fundamental adhesive role and open space for further social studies.