Viscous democracy for social networks

Liquid FM: Recommending Music through Viscous Democracy

Most modern recommendation systems use the approach of collaborative filtering : users that are believed to behave alike are used to produce recommendations. In this work we describe an application (Liquid FM) taking a completely different approach. Liquid FM is a music recommendation system that makes the user responsible for the recommended items. Suggestions are the result of a voting scheme...

Understanding Social Democracy

Participatory democracy in social movements

Participatory democracy refers to an organizational form in which decision making is decentralized, nonhierarchical, and consensus oriented. It can be contrasted with bureaucracy, in which decision making is centralized, hierarchical, and based on a formal division of labor, as well as with majority vote. Participatory democratic organizations have been a prominent feature of many progressive m...

Social Networks, Interpersonal Trust, and Support for Democracy in East Asia

Civil society has been regard as a prerequisite for democracy, and social networks and interpersonal trust are two important elements of civil society. By using data from the Asian Barometer Survey, this study investigates the effects of social networks and interpersonal trust on public support for democracy in three East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The results of statis...

A centralized privacy-preserving framework for online social networks

There are some critical privacy concerns in the current online social networks (OSNs). Users' information is disclosed to different entities that they were not supposed to access. Furthermore, the notion of friendship is inadequate in OSNs since the degree of social relationships between users dynamically changes over the time. Additionally, users may define similar privacy settings for their f...