A Trust Model Based Analysis of Social Networks

In this paper, we analyse the sustainability of social networks using STrust, our social trust model. The novelty of the model is that it introduces the concept of engagement trust and combines it with the popularity trust to derive the social trust of the community as well as of individual members in the community. This enables the recommender system to use these different types of trust to recommend different things to the community, and identify (and recommend) different roles. For example, it recommends mentors using the engagement trust and leaders using the popularity trust. We then show the utility of the model by analysing data from two types of social networks. We also study the sustainability of a community through our social trust model. We observe that a 5% drop in highly trusted members causes more than a 50% drop in social capital that, in turn, raises the question of sustainability of the community. We report our analysis and its results.