Abstract

With the rise in popularity of social media platforms like Twitter, having higher influence on these platforms has a greater value attached to it, since it has the power to influence many decisions in the form of brand promotions and shaping opinions. However, blackmarket services that allow users to inorganically gain influence are a threat to the credibility of these social networking platforms. Twitter users can gain inorganic appraisals in the form of likes, retweets, and follows through these blackmarket services either by paying for them or by joining syndicates wherein they gain such appraisals by providing similar appraisals to other users. These customers tend to exhibit a mix of organic and inorganic retweeting behavior, making it tougher to detect them.
In this article, we investigate these blackmarket customers engaged in collusive retweeting activities. We collect and annotate a novel dataset containing various …

Date

2020

Authors

Udit Arora, Hridoy Sankar Dutta, Brihi Joshi, Aditya Chetan, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Journal

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)

Volume

11

Issue

3

Pages

1-24

Publisher

ACM