Malicious Account Identification in Social Network Platforms

Today, people of all ages are increasingly using Web platforms for social interaction. Consequently, many tasks are being transferred over social networks, like advertisements, political communications, and so on, yielding vast volumes of data disseminated over the network. However, this raises several concerns regarding the truthfulness of such data and the accounts generating them. Malicious users often manipulate data to gain profit. For example, malicious users often create fake accounts and fake followers to increase their popularity and attract more sponsors, followers, and so on, potentially producing several negative implications that impact the whole society. To deal with these issues, it is necessary to increase the capability to properly identify fake accounts and followers. By exploiting automatically extracted data correlations characterizing meaningful patterns of malicious accounts, in this article we propose a new feature engineering strategy to augment the social network account dataset with additional features, aiming to enhance the capability of existing machine learning strategies to discriminate fake accounts. Experimental results produced through several machine learning models on account datasets of both the Twitter and the Instagram platforms highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach toward the automatic discrimination of fake accounts. The choice of Twitter is mainly due to its strict privacy laws, and because its the only social network platform making data of their accounts publicly available.