Spammer Detection on Weibo Social Network

Social network has become a very popular way for internet users to communicate and interact online. Users spend a great deal of time on famous social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, etc.), reading news, discussing events and posting their messages. Unfortunately, this popularity also attracts a significant amount of spammers who continuously expose malicious behaviors (e.g. Post messages containing commercial topics or URLs, following a larger amount of users, etc.), leading to great inconvenience on normal users´ social activities. In this paper, a supervised machine learning based spammer filtering method is proposed. We first collected a dataset from Sina Weibo that includes 30,116 users and more than 16 million messages, then, construct a labeled dataset of users and manually classify users into spammers and non-spammers, after that, abstract a set of novel features from message content and users´ social behavior, and apply into SVM based spammer classifier. Our experiments show that true positive rate of spammers and non-spammers could reach 99.1% and 99.9%.