DocumentCode
170571
Title
What scale of audience a campaign can reach in what price on Twitter?
Author
Yubao Zhang ; Xin Ruan ; Haining Wang ; Hui Wang
Author_Institution
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Coll. of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA
fYear
2014
fDate
April 27 2014-May 2 2014
Firstpage
1168
Lastpage
1176
Abstract
Campaigns with commercial and spam purposes have flooded the Twitter community. To understand what scale of audience a campaign could reach, we first perform a measurement study by collecting a dataset of about 10 million tweets via streaming API and one million search tweets for targeting topics, as well as 37,313 user accounts that are suspended by Twitter. From the dataset, we extract a spam campaign and a commercial promotion campaign accompanied by spamming activities. Then, we characterize the way in which a campaign can reach its audience, especially revealing the features that dominate the information diffusion. After identifying the accounts suspended by Twitter, we further inspect to what extent these features can help to weed out spam accounts. Also, the retrospective inspection is useful to uncover the tactics that malicious accounts utilize to avoid being suspended. Using the measurement results, we then develop a theoretical framework based on an epidemic model to investigate the dynamics of spammers and victims whom spammers reach in the spam campaign. With the theoretical framework, we conduct a benefit-cost analysis of the spam campaign, shedding lights on how to restrict the benefit of the spam campaign.
Keywords
application program interfaces; cost-benefit analysis; social networking (online); unsolicited e-mail; Twitter; benefit-cost analysis; campaign; commercial promotion campaign; epidemic model; information diffusion; spam accounts; spam campaign; spammer dynamics; spamming activities; streaming API; tweets; Computers; Conferences; Feature extraction; Games; Time factors; Twitter;
fLanguage
English
Publisher
ieee
Conference_Titel
INFOCOM, 2014 Proceedings IEEE
Conference_Location
Toronto, ON
Type
conf
DOI
10.1109/INFOCOM.2014.6848048
Filename
6848048
Link To Document