Can you judge a man by his friends? - Enhancing spammer detection on the twitter microblogging platform using friends and followers

Abstract

As online social networks acquire a larger user base, they also become more interesting targets for spammers. Spam can take very different forms on social web sites and can not always be detected by analyzing textual content. However, the platform's social nature also offers new ways of approaching the spam problem. In this work we analyze a user's friends and followers to gain information on him. Next, we evaluate them using different metrics to determine the amount of trust his peers give him. We use the Twitter microblogging platform for this case study. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.