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Web 2.0 promises rich opportunities for information sharing, electronic commerce, and new modes of social interaction, all centered around the "social Web" of user-contributed content, social annotations, and person-to-person social connections. But the increasing reliance on this "social Web" also places individuals and their computer systems at risk, creating opportunities for malicious participants to exploit the tight social fabric of these networks. With these problems in mind, we propose the SocialTrust framework for tamper-resilient trust establishment in online communities. SocialTrust provides community users with dynamic trust values by (i) distinguishing relationship quality from trust; (ii) incorporating a personalized feedback mechanism for adapting as the community evolves; and (iii) tracking user behavior. We experimentally evaluate the SocialTrust framework using real online social networking data consisting of millions of MySpace profiles and relationships. We find that SocialTrust supports robust trust establishment even in the presence of large-scale collusion by malicious participants.
Caverlee et al. (Mon,) studied this question.