research-article

Loosing "friends" on Facebook

Authors:

Daniele Quercia,

Mansoureh Bodaghi,

Jon CrowcroftAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '12: Proceedings of the 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference

Pages 251 - 254

https://doi.org/10.1145/2380718.2380751

Published: 22 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Recent analyses of self-reported data (mainly survey data) seem to suggest that social rules for ending relationships are transformed on Facebook. There seem to be a radical difference between offline and online worlds: reasons for ending online relationships are different than those for ending offline ones. These preliminary findings are, however, not supported by any quantitative evidence, and that is why we put them to test. We consider a variety of factors (e.g., age, gender, personality traits) that studies in sociology have found to be associated with friendship dissolution in the real world and study whether these factors are still important in the context of Facebook. Upon analyzing 34,012 Facebook relationships, we found that, on average, a relationship is more likely to break if it is not embedded in the same social circle, if it is between two people whose ages differ, and if one of the two is neurotic or introvert. Interestingly, we also found that a relationship with a common female friend is more robust than that with a common male friend. These findings are in line with previous analyses of another popular social-networking platform, that of Twitter. All this goes to suggest that there is not much difference between offline and online worlds and, given this predictability, one could easily build tools for monitoring online relations.

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Cited By

Farokhi SFoumani AQi XDerr TKarimi H(2025)EDGE-UP: Enhanced Dynamic GNN Ensemble for Unfollow Prediction in Online Social NetworksSocial Networks Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_2(20-39)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_2
Zhou AWang YChen LÖzsu M(2024)Positive Communities on Signed Graphs That Are Not Echo Chambers: A Clique-Based Approach2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00199(2531-2543)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00199
Muro CLi BHe K(2023)Link Prediction and Unlink Prediction on Dynamic NetworksIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2022.316222910:2(590-601)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2022.3162229
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Index Terms

Loosing "friends" on Facebook
1. Human-centered computing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '12: Proceedings of the 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference

June 2012

531 pages

ISBN:9781450312288

DOI:10.1145/2380718

Conference Chairs:
Noshir Contractor,
Brian Uzzi,
Program Chairs:
Michael Macy
Cornell University
,
Wolfgang Nejdl
L3S Research Center

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 June 2012

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WebSci '12

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WebSci '12: Web Science 2012

June 22 - 24, 2012

Illinois, Evanston

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Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Farokhi SFoumani AQi XDerr TKarimi H(2025)EDGE-UP: Enhanced Dynamic GNN Ensemble for Unfollow Prediction in Online Social NetworksSocial Networks Analysis and Mining10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_2(20-39)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_2
Zhou AWang YChen LÖzsu M(2024)Positive Communities on Signed Graphs That Are Not Echo Chambers: A Clique-Based Approach2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00199(2531-2543)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00199
Muro CLi BHe K(2023)Link Prediction and Unlink Prediction on Dynamic NetworksIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2022.316222910:2(590-601)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2022.3162229
Mavaluru DMubarakali ANarapureddy BRamakrishnan JJohn RRavishankar NKarthika P(2023)Deep convolutional neural network based real-time abnormal behavior detection in social networksComputers and Electrical Engineering10.1016/j.compeleceng.2023.108987111(108987)Online publication date: Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2023.108987
Medeiros DWebb L(2022)Remaining Facebook versus Face-to-Face Friends after a Romantic BreakupResearch Anthology on Usage, Identity, and Impact of Social Media on Society and Culture10.4018/978-1-6684-6307-9.ch059(1121-1139)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-6307-9.ch059
Bonassi ACataldo IGabrieli GTandiono MFoo JLepri BEsposito G(2022)The Interaction between Serotonin Transporter Allelic Variation and Maternal Care Modulates Instagram Sociability in a Sample of Singaporean UsersInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph1909534819:9(5348)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2022
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Breuer JKmetty ZHaim MStier S(2022)User-centric approaches for collecting Facebook data in the ‘post-API age’: experiences from two studies and recommendations for future researchInformation, Communication & Society10.1080/1369118X.2022.209701526:14(2649-2668)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
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Fu TZou L(2022)A bottom-up simulation on competition of online interpersonal communication platformsJournal of Economic Interaction and Coordination10.1007/s11403-022-00351-y17:4(897-925)Online publication date: 7-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11403-022-00351-y
Park SWhiting MShanks M(2022)Dancing with Ambiguity Online: When Our Online Actions Cause ConfusionDesign Thinking Research10.1007/978-3-031-09297-8_3(37-56)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2022
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Zhu QSkoric M(2021)From Context Collapse to “Safe Spaces”: Selective Avoidance Through Tie Dissolution on Social MediaMass Communication and Society10.1080/15205436.2021.1883671Online publication date: 5-Feb-2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2021.1883671
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