26. HOOTAN RASHTIAN
Information acquired: 2025
HOOTAN RASHTIAN is an academic who published a paper in 2014 entitled Towards understanding how users decide about friendship requests in Online Social Networks. HOOTAN RASHTIAN published this work as part of a team: Rashtian, Hootan. Here is a description of this work: Acc,,pting friend requests from strangers in Facebook-like online social networks is known to be a risky behavior. Still, empirical evidence suggests that Facebook users often accept such requests with high rate. As a first step towards technology support of users in their decisions about friend requests, we investigate why users accept such requests. We conducted two studies of users' befriending behavior on Facebook. Based on 20 interviews with active Facebook users, we developed a friend request acceptance model that explains how various factors influence user acceptance behavior. To test and refine our model, we also conducted a quantitative study with 397 participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We found that four factors significantly impact the receiver's decision towards requests sent from strangers, namely, knowing the reque.