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Humans always find themselves involved in social groups. Today, these groups are routinely mediated by communication technology. Web 2.0 -the social web-is characterized best as the set of tools that facilitate production and distribution of content produced by everyday people. In particular, there is currently pervasive interest in the relationship between this content, (online) social networks, the nature of people's relationships mediated by websites like Facebook.com, and the changing role people now play in the production and consumption of mass-mediated messages. Considering that sites like Facebook.com facilitate the accumulation of expansive networks of acquaintances, there are pressing questions about the relationship between the characteristics of online networks, access to social capital, and outcomes like psychological wellbeing and access to resources embedded in these networks.Social networks are the conduit for the entirety of human social behavior and are comprised by a range of relationships with varying qualities. Granovetter (1973Granovetter ( , 1982 was the first to formalize the nature of relationship strength in social networks by arguing that social networks consist of relationships ranging from very weak in strength to very strong. Weak and strong tie relationships afford access to

Purpose: The current study explores the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing -a linguistic mannerism that conveys high arousal emotion -based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect.• Design/methodology/approach: The study performs a series of mixed-effect logistic regressions to investigate the contagious potential of offensive comments collected from YouTube in response to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign videos posted between January and April 2016. • Findings: The study examines non-random incidences of two types of swearing online: public and interpersonal. Findings suggest that a first-level (a.k.a. parent) comment's public swearing tends to trigger chains of interpersonal swearing in the second-level (a.k.a. child) comments. Meanwhile, among the child-comments, a sequentially preceding comment's swearing is contagious to the following comment only across the same swearing type. Based on the findings, the study concludes that offensive comments are contagious and have impact on shaping the community-wide linguistic norms of online user interactions. • Originality/value: The study discusses the ways in which an individual's display of offensiveness may influence and shape discursive cultures on the Internet. This study delves into the mechanisms of text-based contagion by differentiating between mimicry effect and social interaction effect. While online emotional contagion research to this date has focused on the difference between positive and negative valence, Internet research that specifically look at the contagious potential of offensive expressions remain sparse.

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This study investigated the instrumental value of resources embedded in online social networks. 49 primary participants solicited a total of 588 secondary participants who were asked to complete a modest task. Approximately 16 per cent of all secondary participants responded (N = 98) to the request. 8.5 per cent of weak ties responded and strong ties were about three times more likely to respond. Perceived reciprocity, contact frequency and a composite measure of tie strength were all positively related to enacted support.

Twitter is a social news service in which information is selected and distributed by individual members of the tweet audience. While communication literature has studied traditional news media and the propagation of information, to our knowledge there have been no studies of the new social media and their impacts on the propagation of news during extreme event situations. This exploration attempts to build an understanding of how preexisting hyperlink structures on the Web and different types of information channels affect Twitter audiences' information selection. The study analyzes the concentration of user-selected information sources in Twitter about the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict. There are three findings. First, a statistical test of a power-law structure revealed that, while a wide range of information was selected and redistributed by Twitter users, the aggregation of these selections over-represented a small number of prominent websites. Second, binomial regression analyses showed that Twitter user selections were not constituted randomly but were affected by the number of hyperlinks received and the types of information channels. Third, temporal analyses revealed that sources via social media channels were more prominently selected especially in the later stages of the news information lifespan.