Strangers You May Know: Social Surveillance and Intimacy Online
نویسندگان
چکیده
Online social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn regularly use People You May Know (PYMK) algorithms to encourage connectivity among their users. We argue that these algorithms have the unintended effect of making users’ interactions more visible, which can deter them from being intimate online. To test this theory, we analyze data from a large online social network that lets users buy and exchange electronic greeting cards (eCards) with each other over the network. We find that users are more likely to buy eCards when they have more connections, but less likely to buy them when they have formed connections to friends of friends. We attribute the latter effect to the increased visibility that comes with connecting to friends of friends, which PYMK algorithms encourage. We find no effect of users’ friends connecting to each other, suggesting that the PYMK effect has to do with promoting surveillance by relative strangers rather than with increasing network density more broadly.
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