Romantic partnerships and the dispersion of social ties: a network analysis of relationship status on facebook

  • Authors:
  • Lars Backstrom;Jon Kleinberg

  • Affiliations:
  • Facebook, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, USA;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

A crucial task in the analysis of on-line social-networking systems is to identify important people --- those linked by strong social ties --- within an individual's network neighborhood. Here we investigate this question for a particular category of strong ties, those involving spouses or romantic partners. We organize our analysis around a basic question: given all the connections among a person's friends, can you recognize his or her romantic partner from the network structure alone? Using data from a large sample of Facebook users, we find that this task can be accomplished with high accuracy, but doing so requires the development of a new measure of tie strength that we term `dispersion' --- the extent to which two people's mutual friends are not themselves well-connected. The results offer methods for identifying types of structurally significant people in on-line applications, and suggest a potential expansion of existing theories of tie strength.