A network device applies Hebbian-based learning to provide content recommendations in content-based social networks. The method includes obtaining customer activity data for a content-based social network; modeling the customer activity data as nodes and edges within the content-based social network, the nodes representing users and the edges representing connections between the users; assigning initial weights to the edges, that correspond to a connection strength, based on user-designated of relationships between the nodes; adjusting the initial weights in response to temporally correlated activity between the nodes from the customer activity data, to provide adjusted weights; identifying a content recommendation for a particular node based on an activity to access content by another node and one or more of the adjusted weights; storing a customer profile including the content recommendations associated with a node; and providing the content recommendation to a user device associated with the customer profile.