Linking User Accounts across Social Media Platforms

Abstract

To improve social media analysis across diverse platforms, an effective method to evaluate the possibility that different accounts belong to the same users is required. This might be used to support fake news detection or other nefarious activities. In this paper, we present an approach to calculate the probability that different social media accounts on diverse social media platforms belong to the same user. We consider various platform aspects related to user accounts that can be used for user matching including the selected username, the avatar or profile picture, the content of platform posts and related metadata such as the writing style, account binding and use of hyperlinks across platforms. The experimental results showed that the approach is able to distinguish whether the same person has different platform accounts with an F1-score of up to 0.937.