“TwitterSpamDetector”

Abstract

Twitter is the most popular microblogging platform which lets users post status messages called tweets. This popularity and the advanced API provided by Twitter to read and write Twitter data programmatically attracts the attention of spammers as well as legitimate users. Since Twitter has some unique characteristics, the traditional spam detecting methods cannot be directly used to detect spam on Twitter. Therefore, a spam detection framework which is specially designed for Twitter namely TwitterSpamDetector is proposed in this paper. TwitterSpamDetector uses Twitter-specific features to detect spam on Twitter. 77,033 tweets which are posted by 50,490 users collected using the API provided by Twitter. Naive Bayes is used to train TwitterSpamDetector using the selected features of Twitter which clearly classify the spammers from legitimate users. According to the evaluation result, TwitterSpamDetector's accuracy and sensitivity are calculated as 0.943 and 0.913, respectively.