Uncovering Fake Likers in Online Social Networks

As the commercial implications of Likes in online social networks multiply, the number of fake Likes also increase rapidly. To maintain a healthy ecosystem, however, it is critically important to prevent and detect such fake Likes. Toward this goal, in this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting the so-called "fake likers" who frequently make fake Likes for illegitimate reasons. To uncover fake Likes in online social networks, we: (1) first collect a substantial number of profiles of both fake and legitimate Likers using linkage and honeypot approaches, (2) analyze the characteristics of both types of Likers, (3) identify effective features exploiting the learned characteristics and apply them in supervised learning models, and (4) thoroughly evaluate their performances against three baseline methods and under two attack models. Our experimental results show that our proposed methods with effective features significantly outperformed baseline methods, with accuracy = 0.871, false positive rate = 0.1, and false negative rate = 0.14.