TY - GEN
T1 - Follow the green
T2 - 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2013
AU - Stringhini, Gianluca
AU - Wang, Gang
AU - Egele, Manuel
AU - Kruegel, Christopher
AU - Vigna, Giovanni
AU - Zheng, Haitao
AU - Zhao, Ben Y.
PY - 2013/12/16
Y1 - 2013/12/16
N2 - The users of microblogging services, such as Twitter, use the count of followers of an account as a measure of its reputation or influence. For those unwilling or unable to attract followers naturally, a growing industry of "Twitter follower markets" provides followers for sale. Some markets use fake accounts to boost the follower count of their customers, while others rely on a pyramid scheme to turn non-paying customers into followers for each other, and into followers for paying customers. In this paper, we present a detailed study of Twitter follower markets, report in detail on both the static and dynamic properties of customers of these markets, and develop and evaluate multiple techniques for detecting these activities. We show that our detection system is robust and reliable, and can detect a significant number of customers in the wild.
AB - The users of microblogging services, such as Twitter, use the count of followers of an account as a measure of its reputation or influence. For those unwilling or unable to attract followers naturally, a growing industry of "Twitter follower markets" provides followers for sale. Some markets use fake accounts to boost the follower count of their customers, while others rely on a pyramid scheme to turn non-paying customers into followers for each other, and into followers for paying customers. In this paper, we present a detailed study of Twitter follower markets, report in detail on both the static and dynamic properties of customers of these markets, and develop and evaluate multiple techniques for detecting these activities. We show that our detection system is robust and reliable, and can detect a significant number of customers in the wild.
KW - Follower markets
KW - Online social networks
KW - Sybils
KW - Twitter
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84890091177&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84890091177&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2504730.2504731
DO - 10.1145/2504730.2504731
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84890091177
SN - 9781450319539
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 163
EP - 176
BT - IMC 2013 - Proceedings of the 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference
Y2 - 23 October 2013 through 25 October 2013
ER -