Abstract
Fake malicious accounts are one of the primary causes of the deterioration of social network content quality. Numerous such accounts are generated by attackers to achieve multiple nefarious goals, including phishing, spamming, spoof- ing, and promotion. These practices pose significant challenges regarding the availability of credible data that reflect real- world social media interactions. This has led to the development of various methods and approaches to combat spammers on social media networks. Previous studies, however, have almost exclusively focused on studying and identifying English-language spam profiles, whereas the problem of malicious Arabic-language accounts remains under-addressed in the literature. In this paper, therefore, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of malicious Arabic-language campaigns on Twitter. The study involves analyzing the accounts of these campaigns from several perspectives, including their number, content, social interaction graphs, lifespans, and day-to-day activities. In addition to expos- ing their spamming tactics, we find that these spam accounts are more successful in avoiding Twitter suspensions that has been previously reported in the literature.
Highlights
Social media networks have profoundly affected life today and have become massive platforms for communication and information exchange
A remarkable example of this influence is the role of social media in the Arab Spring, which was extensively reported in the literature [1], [2], [3].People have embraced such web platforms as independent media not subject to political parties or organizations
Besides restricting freedom of expression, the quality of social media content as an informative tool used for various purposes is inevitably diminished by these actions
Summary
Social media networks have profoundly affected life today and have become massive platforms for communication and information exchange. The number of Arabic-language users on social media networks, including ill-intentioned individuals, increased tremendously after the Arab spring [8] Some users misuse these websites to share inappropriate, deceptive, and offensive material, for intrusive advertising, public opinion manipulation, and to spread malicious malware, for example. Six hundred profiles of the two campaigns have been analyzed and split into two generations: one generation’s activities were recorded for Apr-Dec 2018 and the second one’s for AugSep 2019 Through this analysis, many results are revealed regarding malicious Arabic-language groups, including how they coordinate accounts in clusters, how they use the clusters to target trending topics, their group interaction characteristics, the content characteristics described by the tweet functions, and the self-similarity ratios of the profiles. Our main contributions for the journal version include an expanded detailed analysis that covers several aspects of these groups
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