Exploring the effects of link recommendations on social networks: An agent-based modeling approach

The vast majority of recommender system research has focused on improving performance accuracy, while limited work has explored their societal, network level effects. This paper demonstrates how simulation can be used to investigate macro level effects of online social network link recommendations, such as whether these technologies may be fragmenting or bridging communities of individuals. An agent-based model is presented that generates stylized online social networks with different percentages of real world contacts and link recommendations. Results show that networks with higher percentages of recommendation-based links produce more clustered, distinct, and dispersed communities, suggesting that these technologies could fragment society. Furthermore, scale-free network properties diminished with higher percentages of recommendations, suggesting that these technologies could be contributing to recent findings that social networks are at most 'weakly' scale-free. Building upon this research, further simulation work could inform the design of link recommendation algorithms that help connect both individuals and communities.