Finding Hierarchy in Directed Online Social Networks

Social hierarchy and stratification among humans is a well studied concept in sociology. The popularity of online social networks presents an opportunity to study social hierarchy for different types of networks and at different scales. The authors adopt the premise that people form connections in a social network based on their perceived social hierarchy; as a result, the edge directions in directed social networks can be leveraged to infer hierarchy. In this paper, they define a measure of hierarchy in a directed online social network, and present an efficient algorithm to compute this measure. They validate the measure using ground truth including Wikipedia notability score.