Discovering spammer communities in twitter

Abstract

Online social networks have become immensely popular in recent years and have become the major sources for tracking the reverberation of events and news throughout the world. However, the diversity and popularity of online social networks attract malicious users to inject new forms of spam. Spamming is a malicious activity where a fake user spreads unsolicited messages in the form of bulk message, fraudulent review, malware/virus, hate speech, profanity, or advertising for marketing scam. In addition, it is found that spammers usually form a connected community of spam accounts and use them to spread spam to a large set of legitimate users. Consequently, it is highly desirable to detect such spammer communities existing in social networks. Even though a significant amount of work has been done in the field of detecting spam messages and accounts, not much research has been done in detecting spammer communities and hidden spam accounts. In this work, an unsupervised approach called SpamCom is proposed for detecting spammer communities in Twitter. We model the Twitter network as a multilayer social network and exploit the existence of overlapping community-based features of users represented in the form of Hypergraphs to identify spammers based on their structural behavior and URL characteristics. The use of community-based features, graph and URL characteristics of user accounts, and content similarity among users make our technique very robust and efficient.