On the Behaviour of Deviant Communities in Online Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how deviant online communities, specifically adult content networks, interact with and influence the broader social network, revealing extensive content flow and potential for targeted disruption.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of deviant communities' interactions with mainstream networks and demonstrates how a few core users can significantly disrupt content diffusion.

Findings

Deviant communities are responsible for most content production.

Content from deviant communities reaches at least 450 times more users.

Targeting core users can effectively stop content spread.

Abstract

On-line social networks are complex ensembles of inter-linked communities that interact on different topics. Some communities are characterized by what are usually referred to as deviant behaviors, conducts that are commonly considered inappropriate with respect to the society's norms or moral standards. Eating disorders, drug use, and adult content consumption are just a few examples. We refer to such communities as deviant networks. It is commonly believed that such deviant networks are niche, isolated social groups, whose activity is well separated from the mainstream social-media life. According to this assumption, research studies have mostly considered them in isolation. In this work we focused on adult content consumption networks, which are present in many on-line social media and in the Web in general. We found that few small and densely connected communities are responsible for most of the content production. Differently from previous work, we studied how such communities interact with the whole social network. We found that the produced content flows to the rest of the network mostly directly or through bridge-communities, reaching at least 450 times more users. We also show that a large fraction of the users can be inadvertently exposed to such content through indirect content resharing. We also discuss a demographic analysis of the producers and consumers networks. Finally, we show that it is easily possible to identify a few core users to radically uproot the diffusion process. We aim at setting the basis to study deviant communities in context.