12,056 research outputs found
Cashtag piggybacking: uncovering spam and bot activity in stock microblogs on Twitter
Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded
volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that
much of the content shared in microblogging platforms is created and publicized
by bots and spammers. Yet, the presence (or lack thereof) and the impact of
fake stock microblogs has never systematically been investigated before. Here,
we study 9M tweets related to stocks of the 5 main financial markets in the US.
By comparing tweets with financial data from Google Finance, we highlight
important characteristics of Twitter stock microblogs. More importantly, we
uncover a malicious practice - referred to as cashtag piggybacking -
perpetrated by coordinated groups of bots and likely aimed at promoting
low-value stocks by exploiting the popularity of high-value ones. Among the
findings of our study is that as much as 71% of the authors of suspicious
financial tweets are classified as bots by a state-of-the-art spambot detection
algorithm. Furthermore, 37% of them were suspended by Twitter a few months
after our investigation. Our results call for the adoption of spam and bot
detection techniques in all studies and applications that exploit
user-generated content for predicting the stock market
BlogForever: D2.5 Weblog Spam Filtering Report and Associated Methodology
This report is written as a first attempt to define the BlogForever spam detection strategy. It comprises a survey of weblog spam technology and approaches to their detection. While the report was written to help identify possible approaches to spam detection as a component within the BlogForver software, the discussion has been extended to include observations related to the historical, social and practical value of spam, and proposals of other ways of dealing with spam within the repository without necessarily removing them. It contains a general overview of spam types, ready-made anti-spam APIs available for weblogs, possible methods that have been suggested for preventing the introduction of spam into a blog, and research related to spam focusing on those that appear in the weblog context, concluding in a proposal for a spam detection workflow that might form the basis for the spam detection component of the BlogForever software
The Best Answers? Think Twice: Online Detection of Commercial Campaigns in the CQA Forums
In an emerging trend, more and more Internet users search for information
from Community Question and Answer (CQA) websites, as interactive communication
in such websites provides users with a rare feeling of trust. More often than
not, end users look for instant help when they browse the CQA websites for the
best answers. Hence, it is imperative that they should be warned of any
potential commercial campaigns hidden behind the answers. However, existing
research focuses more on the quality of answers and does not meet the above
need. In this paper, we develop a system that automatically analyzes the hidden
patterns of commercial spam and raises alarms instantaneously to end users
whenever a potential commercial campaign is detected. Our detection method
integrates semantic analysis and posters' track records and utilizes the
special features of CQA websites largely different from those in other types of
forums such as microblogs or news reports. Our system is adaptive and
accommodates new evidence uncovered by the detection algorithms over time.
Validated with real-world trace data from a popular Chinese CQA website over a
period of three months, our system shows great potential towards adaptive
online detection of CQA spams.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure
Large scale crowdsourcing and characterization of Twitter abusive behavior
In recent years online social networks have suffered an increase in sexism, racism, and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior, often manifesting itself through offensive, abusive, or hateful language. Past scientific work focused on studying these forms of abusive activity in popular online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Building on such work, we present an eight month study of the various forms of abusive behavior on Twitter, in a holistic fashion. Departing from past work, we examine a wide variety of labeling schemes, which cover different forms of abusive behavior. We propose an incremental and iterative methodology that leverages the power of crowdsourcing to annotate a large collection of tweets with a set of abuse-related labels.By applying our methodology and performing statistical analysis for label merging or elimination, we identify a reduced but robust set of labels to characterize abuse-related tweets. Finally, we offer a characterization of our annotated dataset
of 80 thousand tweets, which we make publicly available for further scientific exploration.Accepted manuscrip
A Taxonomy of Hyperlink Hiding Techniques
Hidden links are designed solely for search engines rather than visitors. To
get high search engine rankings, link hiding techniques are usually used for
the profitability of black industries, such as illicit game servers, false
medical services, illegal gambling, and less attractive high-profit industry,
etc. This paper investigates hyperlink hiding techniques on the Web, and gives
a detailed taxonomy. We believe the taxonomy can help develop appropriate
countermeasures. Study on 5,583,451 Chinese sites' home pages indicate that
link hidden techniques are very prevalent on the Web. We also tried to explore
the attitude of Google towards link hiding spam by analyzing the PageRank
values of relative links. The results show that more should be done to punish
the hidden link spam.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
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