Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network

  • Authors:

  • Saptarshi Ghosh;Bimal Viswanath;Farshad Kooti;Naveen Kumar Sharma;Gautam Korlam;Fabricio Benevenuto;Niloy Ganguly;Krishna Phani Gummadi

  • Affiliations:

  • Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India;MPI-SWS, Kaiserslautern - Saarbruecken, Germany;MPI-SWS, Kaiserslautern - Saarbruecken, Germany;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India;Federal University of Ouro Preto, Ouro Preto, Brazil;Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India;MPI-SWS, Kaiserslautern - Saarbruecken, India

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2012

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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.