Title
Real-time Detection of Content Polluters in Partially Observable Twitter Networks.
Abstract
Content polluters, or bots that hijack a conversation for political or advertising purposes are a known problem for event prediction, election forecasting and when distinguishing real news from fake news in social media data. Identifying this type of bot is particularly challenging, with state-of-the-art methods utilising large volumes of network data as features for machine learning models. Such datasets are generally not readily available in typical applications which stream social media data for real-time event prediction. In this work we develop a methodology to detect content polluters in social media datasets that are streamed in real-time. Applying our method to the problem of civil unrest event prediction in Australia, we identify content polluters from individual tweets, without collecting social network or historical data from individual accounts. We identify some peculiar characteristics of these bots in our dataset and propose metrics for identification of such accounts. We then pose some research questions around this type of bot detection, including: how good Twitter is at detecting content polluters and how well state-of-the-art methods perform in detecting bots in our dataset.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3184558.3191574
WWW '18: The Web Conference 2018 Lyon France April, 2018
DocType
Volume
ISBN
Journal
abs/1804.01235
978-1-4503-5640-4
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
23
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mehwish Nasim1143.65
Andrew Nguyen211.37
Nick Lothian321.06
Robert Cope401.01
Lewis Mitchell515517.70