Twitter Spam and False Accounts Prevalence, Detection and Characterization: A Survey

Understand

The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade.

• In this paper, I provide a (non-comprehensive) survey of research efforts aimed at estimating the prevalence of spam and false accounts on Twitter, as well as characterizing their use, activity, and behavior.
• I propose a taxonomy of spam and false accounts, enumerating known techniques used to create and detect them.
• Then, I summarize studies estimating the prevalence of spam and false accounts on Twitter.