Journal Article

Online Social Spammer Detection Based on Deep Learning

ZHANG Jiyang, ZHANG Peng, GONG Siyu, SONG Naipeng

2023

Overview

[Purpose/Significance] The development of the Internet has led to the rapid development of social networks, providing users with a convenient channel for the release, dissemination and acceptance of information. However, its low-threshold characteristics have also given rise to a group of the \"Internet water army\"–online social spammers, who are paid to post online comments with particular content and spread false information on purpose. They have become a major problem for the Internet ecology. It is of great significance to detect the Internet water army, prevent their malicious attacks, and combat and eliminate their negative effects on the security of the online public opinion. [Method/Process] First, we analyzed the development process and characteristics of the online social spammers, summarized the algorithms used in previous studies and the characteristics mentioned, and sorted out three research starting points: text features, interaction features and graph structure features. Then, an online social spammer detection method based on deep learning was proposed. Combined with the three aspects of user basic information, historical remarks and interaction behavior, six types of features were extracted from the basic information, recent remarks, social intimacy, interaction behavior, microblog number and membership level. Through feature depth extraction and vector splicing and fusion, the user feature vectors were formed with the same length. Finally, a convolutional neural network was used as a classifier to build an automatic, high-precision and high-efficiency spammer detection model. Two Chinese online spammer datasets collected from the Sina Weibo platform were selected for the experiment. The features of the datasets were spliced and aligned to form the Weibo Spammer 2023 dataset as the model training dataset, which prevented the data features of a single dataset from being too discrete and reducing modle generalization. Considering the overfitting problem in the model training process, we solved the problem by adding abandoned layers. [Results/Conclusions] The online spammer detection model constructed in this experiment has significantly improved in terms of metrics such as precision and accuracy. At the same time, the ablation experiment shows that the six features extracted in this experiment have a positive effect on the detection process. Through empirical analysis, the model constructed in this paper has a high detection accuracy and detection efficiency, which can provide certain technical support and theoretical guidance for online spammer identification. By using machine learning methods to actively identify online social spammer accounts, real-time monitoring and prevention of key spammer accounts can prevent the occurrence of malicious network events more timely and effectively and reduce the risk of illegal forces damaging the public opinion ecology.

• Publisher: Editorial Department of Journal of Library and Information Science in Agriculture
• Subject: network spammer|deep learning|cnn|bag-of-words