Practical OSINT investigation - Similarity calculation using Reddit user profile data

This paper presents a practical Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) use case for user similarity measurements with the use of open profile data from the Reddit social network. This PoC work combines the open data from Reddit and the part of the state-of-the-art BERT model. Using the PRAW Python library, the project fetches comments and posts of users. Then these texts are converted into a feature vector - representation of all user posts and comments. The main idea here is to create a comparable user's pair similarity score based on their comments and posts. For example, if we fix one user and calculate scores of all mutual pairs with other users, we will produce a total order on the set of all mutual pairs with that user. This total order can be described as a degree of written similarity with this chosen user. A set of "similar" users for one particular user can be used to recommend to the user interesting for him people. The similarity score also has a "transitive property": if $user_1$ is "similar" to $user_2$ and $user_2$ is similar to $user_3$ then inner properties of our model guarantees that $user_1$ and $user_3$ are pretty "similar" too. In this way, this score can be used to cluster a set of users into sets of "similar" users. It could be used in some recommendation algorithms or tune already existing algorithms to consider a cluster's peculiarities. Also, we can extend our model and calculate feature vectors for subreddits. In that way, we can find similar to the user's subreddits and recommend them to him.