Influences of Facebook Torrent dissemination in BitTorrent Swarms

Bittorrent is one of the most popular file sharing applications on the Internet. It is well-known that its success mainly depends on its user cooperation. Systems with a small number of altruist users or without incentive mechanisms are fated to failure. This paper discusses the influence of Facebook on Bittorrent swarms. We analyze data from more than 16,600 Bittorrent swarms disseminated by Facebook and by traditional torrent websites. Our results show that the dissemination process is enhanced when a torrent is announced on a social network. Social torrents have up to 50% more seeders and four times more peers that participate on multiple swarms. Furthermore, peers in social torrents exhibit high locality, both geographically and in terms of ASes. If the Bittorrent protocol leverages the knowledge of physical networks for building the P2P overlay network, social torrents may have better locality in the partnerships established between peers. As consequence, social torrents may have better throughput, faster data dissemination and less data traffic between ASes.