What they do in shadows: Twitter underground follower market

摘要: Internet users and businesses are increasingly using online social networks (OSN) to drive audience traffic increase their popularity. In order boost presence, OSN need the visibility reach of profile, like — Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Instagram comments Yelp reviews. For example, an in followers not only improves user but also boosts perceived reputation This has led a scope for underground market that provides comments, etc. via network fraudulent compromised accounts various collusion techniques. this paper, we landscape markets provide by studying basic building blocks merchants, customers phony followers. We charecterize services provided merchants understand operational structure hierarchy. can operationalize premium monetary scheme or other incentivized freemium schemes. find out oligopoly with few being leaders. show merchant popularity does have any correlation quality service its customers. Our findings shed light on characteristics market. draw comparison between legitimate key identifiers separate such users. With help these differentiating features, build supervised learning model predict suspicious following behaviour accuracy 89.2%.