DSpamOnto: An Ontology Modelling for Domain-Specific Social Spammers in Microblogging

Abstract

The lack of regulations and oversight on Online Social Networks (OSNs) has resulted in the rise of social spam, which is the dissemination of unsolicited and low-quality content that aims to deceive and manipulate users. Social spam can cause a range of negative consequences for individuals and businesses, such as the spread of malware, phishing scams, and reputational damage. While machine learning techniques can be used to detect social spammers by analysing patterns in data, they have limitations such as the potential for false positives and false negatives. In contrast, ontologies allow for the explicit modelling and representation of domain knowledge, which can be used to create a set of rules for identifying social spammers. However, the literature exposes a deficiency of ontologies that conceptualize domain-based social spam. This paper aims to address this gap by designing a domain-specific ontology called DSpamOnto to detect social spammers in microblogging that targes a specific domain. DSpamOnto can identify social spammers based on their domain-specific behaviour, such as posting repetitive or irrelevant content and using misleading information. The proposed model is compared and benchmarked against well-proven ML models using various evaluation metrics to verify and validate its utility in capturing social spammers.