Failure in Complex Social Networks

Tolerance against failures and errors is an important feature of many complex networked systems [1,2]. It has been shown that a class of inhomogeneously wired networks called scale-free[1,3] networks can be surprisingly robust to failures, suggesting that socially self-organized systems such as the World-Wide Web, the Internet, and other kinds of social networks [4] may have significant tolerance against failures by virtue of their scale-free degree distribution. I show that this finding only holds on the assumption that the diffusion process supported by the network is a simple one, requiring only a single contact in order for transmission to be successful.