Method of Improving the Information Security of Virtual Communities in Social Networking Services

Today, social networking services have become one of the most powerful means of mass communication between their users – actors. Social networking services are increasingly acting not only as a mean for the content exchange in the virtual environment, but also as a mean for self-organization of citizens in their real life. Therefore, on the one hand, social networking services are an objective reality of modern life, on the other hand, as the experience of many countries of the world and, first of all, Ukraine shows, is a source of threats to its information security. For example, the result of unfriendly infor- mation operations in social networking services is the manipulation of public opinion, the spread of appeals that accentuate international, interreligious and interethnic conflicts, provoke terrorism, separatism and other manifestations of violence and crimes against humanity, peace and security. The article reveals one of the methods of countering such threats. The core method is to increase the information stability of virtual communities in social networking services to destructive information influences through their hidden artificially controlled formation. The formation of information resistant virtual communities is sug- gested to be carried out on the basis of the critical mass principle. This ap- proach, firstly, provides their further stable development (artificially controlled hidden increase in the number of participants) and, secondly, guarantees critical perception of the content of destructive matter. In addition, for those virtual communities that have unsatisfactory quality performance indicators, it is of- fered to use latent synergistic management in the form of directed information influence. The accuracy of the developed method has been proved experimen- tally. As a result of the study, it is found that the information stability of virtual communities in social networking services at the time of using the suggested method is higher in comparison with the natural uncontrolled processes of their creation.