User's Reaction Patterns in Online Social Network Communities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how users in online social network communities react to specific events, revealing that community behaviors can change significantly and suggesting the need for personalized intervention strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a user-centered approach to understanding community reaction patterns and highlights the importance of tailoring interventions based on individual user responses.

Findings

Communities develop distinct undesired behavior patterns in response to specific events.

Community behavior dynamics can be significantly altered by particular events.

Understanding individual user reactions is crucial for effective intervention strategies.

Abstract

Several one-fits-all intervention policies were introduced by the Online Social Networks (OSNs) platforms to mitigate potential harms. Nevertheless, some studies showed the limited effectiveness of these approaches. An alternative to this would be a user-centered design of intervention policies. In this context, we study the susceptibility of users to undesired behavior in communities on OSNs. In particular, we explore their reaction to specific events. Our study shows that communities develop different undesired behavior patterns in reaction to specific events. These events can significantly alter the behavior of the community and invert the dynamics of behavior within the whole network. Our findings stress out the importance of understanding the reasons behind the changes in users' reactions and highlights the need of fine-tuning the research to the individual's level. It paves the way towards building better OSNs' intervention strategies centered on the user.