Identifying active, reactive, and inactive targets of socialbots in Twitter

Abstract

Online social networks are facing serious threats due to presence of human-behaviour imitating malicious bots (aka socialbots) that are successful mainly due to existence of their duped followers. In this paper, we propose an approach to categorize Twitter users into three groups - active, reactive, and inactive targets, based on their interaction behaviour with socialbots. Active users are those who themselves follow socialbots without being followed by them, reactive users respond to the following socialbots by following them back, whereas inactive users do not show any interest against the following requests from anonymous socialbots. The proposed approach is modelled as both binary and ternary classification problem, wherein users' profile is generated using static and dynamic components representing their identical and behavioural aspects. Three different classification techniques viz Naive Bayes, Reduced Error Pruned Decision Tree, and Random Forest are used over a dataset of 749 users collected through live experiment, and a thorough analyses of the identified users categories is presented, wherein it is found that active and reactive users keep on frequently updating their tweets containing advertising related contents. Finally, feature ranking algorithms are used to rank identified features to analyse their discriminative power, and it is found that following rate and follower rate are the most dominating features.