The Role of Social Networking in Decision Making: Application of Analytical Hierarchy Process to the Decision Support System

In today’s modern era, technological advancements continue to progress rapidly to facilitate human activities. One significant development is the increasing use of the internet for long-distance communication among Indonesian society. Various social networking platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have made interactions between users much easier. In response to the abundance of social media options, this study aims to evaluate and determine the best alternative among the three platforms. The assessment was conducted using several criteria, including popularity, features, and security. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method was applied to measure the weight of each criterion through normalized eigenvector value calculations. The results indicated that Popularity had an eigenvector value of 0.4742, followed by Security at 0.3764, and Features at 0.1494. Furthermore, a consistency test was conducted using the Consistency Index (CI) and Consistency Ratio (CR) to evaluate the reliability of the pairwise comparison matrix. The CI and CR values obtained for the three criteria were -1.1915 and -2.0544, respectively. According to the AHP method, a decision is considered acceptable if the CR value is less than 0.1 or negative. Therefore, the results of this analysis are deemed consistent and suitable for decision-making purposes.