Stylometric Linkability of Tweets

Abstract

Microblogging is a very popular Internet activity that informs and entertains a large number of people via terse messages; e.g., tweets on Twitter. Even though microblogging does not emphasize privacy, authors can easily hide behind pseudonyms and multiple accounts on the same, or across multiple, site(s). In this paper, we explore stylometric linkability of tweets. Our results clearly demonstrate that multiple sets of tweets by the same author are easily linkable even when the number of possible authors is large. This is also confirmed by showing that linkability holds for a set of actual Twitter users who admittedly tweet via multiple accounts.