Detecting Spam in Chinese Microblogs - A Study on Sina Weibo

Abstract

Sina Weibo is the most popular and fast growing microblogging social network in China. However, more and more spam messages are also emerging on Sina Weibo. How to detect these spam is essential for the social network security. While most previous studies attempt to detect the microblogging spam by identifying spammers, in this paper, we want to exam whether we can detect the spam by each single Weibo message, because we notice that more and more spam Weibos are posted by normal users or even popular verified users. We propose a Weibo spam detection method based on machine learning algorithm. In addition, different from most existing microblogging spam detection methods which are based on English microblogs, our method is designed to deal with the features of Chinese microblogs. Our extensive empirical study shows the effectiveness of our approach.