Blocking in Community-Centric Information Management Approaches for the Social Web

Social networks are emerging as the arteries for information flow on the web. In a previous paper, we introduced a new community-centric approach for information flow control for the social web. This paper introduces two key improvements to the previously introduced mechanisms. The first improvement is the ability to model user heterogeneity with regard to information relaying on the social web. The second improvement is the ability to reduce information flow to a specific user (i.e., block information flowing to a specific user). We evaluate the algorithmic ideas using traces of interactions obtained from Facebook and Flickr. Our evaluations indicate that the algorithmic ideas developed by us are useful in controlling the information flow in the social web.