Homophily in online dating: when do you like someone like yourself?
CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Judging you by the company you keep: dating on social networking sites
Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work
"But the data is already public": on the ethics of research in Facebook
Ethics and Information Technology
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While social network capabilities are proliferating on many online services, research has focused on just a few popular social network sites. In this note, we consider a different kind of social network site, explicitly designed to support particular types of risky sexual activity among men who have sex with men (MSM). We consider the role of ambiguity built into the interface in how users manage self-disclosure and its association with articulating more friends-only or sexual connections on the site. Despite the site's explicit orientation toward risky sexual practices, we find indications that users mitigate potential public health issues through the practice of sero-sorting. We discuss how design considerations that may allow for easier entrance into a community can cause problems for long-term users, or generate potential public health issues.