Online Social Networks: Privacy, Participation and Abuse

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have seen an exponential growth over the last decade, with Facebook having more than 1.5 billion monthly active users and Twitter having 135,000 new users signing up every day as of 2016. Users are sharing 70 million photos per day on the Instagram photo-sharing network. Yahoo Answers question-answering community has more than 1 billion posted answers. The meteoric rise in popularity has made OSNs important social platforms for computer-mediated communications and embedded themselves into society's daily life, with direct consequences to the offline world and activities. This book focuses on abuse, contribution and privacy in online social networks. More specifically, we look at four issues: (1) the content abusers in the community question answering (CQA) social network (2) the privacy risks that comes from the default permissive privacy settings of the OSNs (3) the relationship between users' privacy concerns and their contribution behavior in CQA social networks and (4) the influence of national culture on people's online participation.