A computer-implemented method of predicting tie strength between persons within a social media network includes: modeling tie strengths between a user of the social media network and connected persons in the network as a combination of: a plurality of predictive variables, interactions between dimensions of the predictive variables, and network structure of the social media network; altering or filtering a stream of social media content from the connected persons using the tie strength as associated with the respective connected persons according to the modeling; and delivering the altered or filtered stream of social media content to a communications device of the user.