Benford's Law Applies to Online Social Networks

PLoS One. 2015 Aug 26;10(8):e0135169. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135169. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Benford's Law states that, in naturally occurring systems, the frequency of numbers' first digits is not evenly distributed. Numbers beginning with a 1 occur roughly 30% of the time, and are six times more common than numbers beginning with a 9. We show that Benford's Law applies to social and behavioral features of users in online social networks. Using social data from five major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and LiveJournal), we show that the distribution of first significant digits of friend and follower counts for users in these systems follow Benford's Law. The same is true for the number of posts users make. We extend this to egocentric networks, showing that friend counts among the people in an individual's social network also follows the expected distribution. We discuss how this can be used to detect suspicious or fraudulent activity online and to validate datasets.

MeSH terms

  • Databases, Factual
  • Forensic Sciences
  • Friends
  • Social Networking*
  • Statistics as Topic*

Grants and funding

The author has no support or funding to report.