semantic_scholarOnline Social Networks and Media
Modeling link recommendations as a network growth mechanism and their impact on social contagion
Björn Komander, Jesús Cerquides, Jeffrey Chan, A. Alavi
TL;DR: It is shown that while simple contagions exhibit relatively modest shifts under most recommenders, complex contagions are highly sensitive to clustering-and homophily-based recommendations, thriving at moderate recommendation strengths but sharply diminishing under excessive recommendation strength.
Link recommendation algorithms significantly shape online social networks, influencing both their structural evolution and critical processes such as information and behavior spread. This paper investigates how these algorithms affect simple and complex contagion processes by mod…