To be designated as ‘‘friend,’’ an individual
directs the Facebook system to initiate a request to be recognized as someone’s
friend, to which the two parties—the friend request initiator and the friend
request sender—must agree. When individuals become friends, the system reveals
their personal profiles as well as all their links to other members of their
social networks. New friendship links often snowball via the enlarging and
overlapping friends’ networks thus started.
