Impersonation on social media: a deep neural approach to identify ingenuine content

Koosha Zarei (1, 2, 3) , Reza Farahbakhsh (1, 2, 3) , Noel Crespi (1, 2, 3) , Gareth Tyson (4)

1 IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris
2 TSP - RS2M - Département Réseaux et Services Multimédia Mobiles
3 R3S-SAMOVAR - Réseaux, Systèmes, Services, Sécurité
4 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London

Impersonators are playing an important role in the production and propagation of the content on Online Social Networks, notably on Instagram. These entities are nefarious fake accounts that intend to disguise a legitimate account by making similar profiles and then striking social media by fake content, which makes it considerably harder to understand which posts are genuinely produced. In this study, we focus on three important communities with legitimate verified accounts. Among them, we identify a collection of 2.2K impersonator profiles with nearly 10k generated posts, 68K comments, and 90K likes. Then, based on profile characteristics and user behaviours, we cluster them into two collections of 'bot' and 'fan'. In order to separate the impersonator-generated post from genuine content, we propose a Deep Neural Network architecture that measures 'profiles' and 'posts' features to predict the content type: 'bot-generated', 'fan-generated', or 'genuine' content. Our study shed light into this interesting phenomena and provides interesting observation on bot-generated content that can help us to understand the role of impersonators in the production of fake content on Instagram.

Mots clés: Impersonators; Fake profile; Fake content; Fake engagement; Bot; Instagram; Social media

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Koosha Zarei, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi, Gareth Tyson. Impersonation on social media: a deep neural approach to identify ingenuine content. ASONAM 2020: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, Dec 2020, The Hague (virtual), Netherlands. pp.11-15, ⟨10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381437⟩. ⟨hal-02971399⟩