SPAMMER DETECTION BASED ON ACCOUNT, TWEET, AND COMMUNITY ACTIVITY ON TWITTER

Spammers are the activities of users who abuse Twitter to spread spam. Spammers imitate legitimate user behavior patterns to avoid being detected by spam detectors. Spammers create lots of fake accounts and collaborate with each other to form communities. The collaboration makes it difficult to detect spammers' accounts. This research proposed the development of feature extraction based on hashtags and community activities for the detection of spammer accounts on Twitter. Hashtags are used by spammers to increase popularity. Community activities are used as features for the detection of spammers so as to give weight to the activities of spammers contained in a community. The experimental result shows that the proposed method got the best performance in accuracy, recall, precision and g-means with are 90.55%, 88.04%, 3.18%, and 16.74%, respectively.  The accuracy and g-mean of the proposed method can surpassed previous method with 4.23% and 14.43%. This shows that the proposed method can overcome the problem of detecting spammer on Twitter with better performance compared to state of the art

개인 사회망 네트워크 분석 기반 온라인 사회 공격자 탐지

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 컴퓨터공학부,2020. 2. 김종권.In the last decade we have witnessed the explosive growth of online social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and LinkedIn. While SNSs provide diverse benefits – for example, fostering inter-personal relationships, community formations and news propagation, they also attracted uninvited nuiance. Spammers abuse SNSs as vehicles to spread spams rapidly and widely. Spams, unsolicited or inappropriate messages, significantly impair the credibility and reliability of services. Therefore, detecting spammers has become an urgent and critical issue in SNSs. This paper deals with spamming in Twitter and Weibo. Instead of spreading annoying messages to the public, a spammer follows (subscribes to) normal users, and followed a normal user. Sometimes a spammer makes link farm to increase target accounts explicit influence. Based on the assumption that the online relationships of spammers are different from those of normal users, I proposed classification schemes that detect online social attackers including spammers. I firstly focused on ego-network social relations and devised two features, structural features based on Triad Significance Profile (TSP) and relational semantic features based on hierarchical homophily in an ego-network. Experiments on real Twitter and Weibo datasets demonstrated that the proposed approach is very practical. The proposed features are scalable because instead of analyzing the whole network, they inspect user-centered ego-networks. My performance study showed that proposed methods yield significantly better performance than prior scheme in terms of true positives and false positives.최근 우리는 Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, LinkedIn 등의 다양한 사회 관계망 서비스가 폭발적으로 성장하는 현상을 목격하였다. 하지만 사회 관계망 서비스가 개인과 개인간의 관계 및 커뮤니티 형성과 뉴스 전파 등의 여러 이점을 제공해 주고 있는데 반해 반갑지 않은 현상 역시 발생하고 있다. 스패머들은 사회 관계망 서비스를 동력 삼아 스팸을 매우 빠르고 넓게 전파하는 식으로 악용하고 있다. 스팸은 수신자가 원치 않는 메시지들을 일컽는데 이는 서비스의 신뢰도와 안정성을 크게 손상시킨다. 따라서, 스패머를 탐지하는 것이 현재 소셜 미디어에서 매우 긴급하고 중요한 문제가 되었다. 이 논문은 대표적인 사회 관계망 서비스들 중 Twitter와 Weibo에서 발생하는 스패밍을 다루고 있다. 이러한 유형의 스패밍들은 불특정 다수에게 메시지를 전파하는 대신에, 많은 일반 사용자들을 '팔로우(구독)'하고 이들로부터 '맞 팔로잉(맞 구독)'을 이끌어 내는 것을 목적으로 하기도 한다. 때로는 link farm을 이용해 특정 계정의 팔로워 수를 높이고 명시적 영향력을 증가시키기도 한다. 스패머의 온라인 관계망이 일반 사용자의 온라인 사회망과 다를 것이라는 가정 하에, 나는 스패머들을 포함한 일반적인 온라인 사회망 공격자들을 탐지하는 분류 방법을 제시한다. 나는 먼저 개인 사회망 내 사회 관계에 주목하고 두 가지 종류의 분류 특성을 제안하였다. 이들은 개인 사회망의 Triad Significance Profile (TSP)에 기반한 구조적 특성과 Hierarchical homophily에 기반한 관계 의미적 특성이다. 실제 Twitter와 Weibo 데이터셋에 대한 실험 결과는 제안한 방법이 매우 실용적이라는 것을 보여준다. 제안한 특성들은 전체 네트워크를 분석하지 않아도 개인 사회망만 분석하면 되기 때문에 scalable하게 측정될 수 있다. 나의 성능 분석 결과는 제안한 기법이 기존 방법에 비해 true positive와 false positive 측면에서 우수하다는 것을 보여준다.1 Introduction 1 2 Related Work 6 2.1 OSN Spammer Detection Approaches 6 2.1.1 Contents-based Approach 6 2.1.2 Social Network-based Approach 7 2.1.3 Subnetwork-based Approach 8 2.1.4 Behavior-based Approach 9 2.2 Link Spam Detection 10 2.3 Data mining schemes for Spammer Detection 10 2.4 Sybil Detection 12 3 Triad Significance Profile Analysis 14 3.1 Motivation 14 3.2 Twitter Dataset 18 3.3 Indegree and Outdegree of Dataset 20 3.4 Twitter spammer Detection with TSP 22 3.5 TSP-Filtering 27 3.6 Performance Evaluation of TSP-Filtering 29 4 Hierarchical Homophily Analysis 33 4.1 Motivation 33 4.2 Hierarchical Homophily in OSN 37 4.2.1 Basic Analysis of Datasets 39 4.2.2 Status gap distribution and Assortativity 44 4.2.3 Hierarchical gap distribution 49 4.3 Performance Evaluation of HH-Filtering 53 5 Overall Performance Evaluation 58 6 Conclusion 63 Bibliography 65Docto

Spammers Detection on Twitter by Automated Multi Level Detection System

Twitter is one of the most well known micro-blogging administrations, which is commonly used to share news and updates through short messages confined to 280 characters. In any case, its open nature and huge client base are every now and again misused via robotized spammers, content polluters, and other not well expected clients to carry out different cyber violations, for example, cyber bullying, trolling, rumor dissemination, and stalking. Likewise, various methodologies have been proposed by specialists to address these issues. Nonetheless, the majority of these methodologies depend on client portrayal and totally dismissing shared communications. In this examination, we present a hybrid methodology for recognizing mechanized spammers by amalgamating network based features with other feature classifications, to be specific metadata-, content-, and association based features. The curiosity of the proposed methodology lies in the portrayal of clients dependent on their communications with their supporters given that a client can dodge features that are identified with his/her very own exercises, yet sidestepping those dependent on the devotees is troublesome. Nineteen distinct features, including six recently characterized features and two re-imagined features, are distinguished for learning three classifiers, in particular, irregular woods, choice tree, Bayesian system, and example pre-handling on a genuine dataset that involves generous clients and spammers. The separation intensity of various feature classifications is additionally broke down, and cooperation and network based features are resolved to be the best for spam identification, though metadata-based features are demonstrated to be the least compelling

The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues

Perilaku Informasi Mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Diponegoro dalam Pemanfaatan Fitur Trending Topic Twitter Sebagai Pemenuhan Kebutuhan Informasi

Perilaku Informasi merupakan salah satu kajian Ilmu Perpustakaan dan Informasi yang menggali dan mengeksplorasi tingkah laku manusia dalam memenuhi kebutuhan akan informasi dan bagaimana seseorang atau individu melakukan pencarian informasi. Penelitian ini mengkaji tentang perilaku informasi mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Diponegoro dalam pemanfaatan Twitter khususnya fitur trending topic Twitter. Metode yang digunakan adalah metode kualitatif dengan pengumpulan data wawancara semi terstruktur dengan sembilan (9) informan yang berasal dari mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Diponegoro dan observasi. Data yang diperoleh dianalisis menggunakan thematic analysis untuk mengidentifikasi pola perilaku informan. Hasil analisis menunjukkan tiga tema terkait Perilaku Informasi mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Diponegoro dalam pemanfaatan fitur trending topic Twitter sebagai pemenuhan kebutuhan informasi. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa Mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Diponegoro memiliki dorongan atau motivasi dalam pemenuhan kebutuhan informasi melalui fitur trending topic Twitter sehingga memunculkan suatu kebutuhan informasi yang berbeda-beda, seperti kebutuhan informasi akan hiburan, berita, dan informasi terkini. Kebutuhan informasi menimbulkan suatu penelusuran informasi trending topic Twitter, tentang bagaimana perilaku mahasiswa Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Universitas Diponegoro dalam mencari, mengolah, dan menggunakan informasi yang ada pada fitur trending topic Twitter. Dalam prosesnya terdapat faktor yang mendukung dan menghambat faktor tersebut berupa kelebihan dan kekurangan fitur trending topic Twitter yang dijadikan sebagai sumber informasi. Fitur trending topic memiliki beberapa kelebihan seperti informasi cepat, murah, dan mudah. Adapun untuk kekurangannya yaitu terdapat banyak trending yang tidak jelas dan penyalahgunaan fitur trending topic Twitter.  Hasil penelitian ini dapat bermanfaat bagi semua orang khususnya mahasiswa dalam berperilaku dan memanfaatkan fitur trending topic Twitter sebagai sumber informasi untuk pemenuhan kebutuhan informasinya

Fame for sale: efficient detection of fake Twitter followers

$\textit{Fake followers}$ are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere - hence impacting on economy, politics, and society. In this paper, we contribute along different dimensions. First, we review some of the most relevant existing features and rules (proposed by Academia and Media) for anomalous Twitter accounts detection. Second, we create a baseline dataset of verified human and fake follower accounts. Such baseline dataset is publicly available to the scientific community. Then, we exploit the baseline dataset to train a set of machine-learning classifiers built over the reviewed rules and features. Our results show that most of the rules proposed by Media provide unsatisfactory performance in revealing fake followers, while features proposed in the past by Academia for spam detection provide good results. Building on the most promising features, we revise the classifiers both in terms of reduction of overfitting and cost for gathering the data needed to compute the features. The final result is a novel $\textit{Class A}$ classifier, general enough to thwart overfitting, lightweight thanks to the usage of the less costly features, and still able to correctly classify more than 95% of the accounts of the original training set. We ultimately perform an information fusion-based sensitivity analysis, to assess the global sensitivity of each of the features employed by the classifier. The findings reported in this paper, other than being supported by a thorough experimental methodology and interesting on their own, also pave the way for further investigation on the novel issue of fake Twitter followers