Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network
- 16 April 2012
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Abstract
Recently, Twitter has emerged as a popular platform for discovering real-time information on the Web, such as news stories and people's reaction to them. Like the Web, Twitter has become a target for link farming, where users, especially spammers, try to acquire large numbers of follower links in the social network. Acquiring followers not only increases the size of a user's direct audience, but also contributes to the perceived influence of the user, which in turn impacts the ranking of the user's tweets by search engines. In this paper, we first investigate link farming in the Twitter network and then explore mechanisms to discourage the activity. To this end, we conducted a detailed analysis of links acquired by over 40,000 spammer accounts suspended by Twitter. We find that link farming is wide spread and that a majority of spammers' links are farmed from a small fraction of Twitter users, the social capitalists, who are themselves seeking to amass social capital and links by following back anyone who follows them. Our findings shed light on the social dynamics that are at the root of the link farming problem in Twitter network and they have important implications for future designs of link spam defenses. In particular, we show that a simple user ranking scheme that penalizes users for connecting to spammers can effectively address the problem by disincentivizing users from linking with other users simply to gain influence.Keywords
This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- Suspended accounts in retrospectPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2011
- Fragile online relationshipPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2011
- Detecting and Analyzing Automated Activity on TwitterLecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
- Link analysis for Web spam detectionACM Transactions on the Web, 2008
- Identifying link farm spam pagesPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2005
- Topic-sensitive PageRankPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2002
- Topic-sensitive PageRankPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2002
- Integrating the document object model with hyperlinks for enhanced topic distillation and information extractionPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2001
- The stochastic approach for link-structure analysis (SALSA) and the TKC effectComputer Networks, 2000
- Improved algorithms for topic distillation in a hyperlinked environmentPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1998