Observation on Spammers in Sina Weibo

Micro-blogging service has been developing and evolving rapidly in China which has led to a significant rise in social spamming attacks. However, little is known about these spammers. Thus, in this paper, we presented an observation on spammers in Sina Weibo, the biggest micro-blogging community in China. Specifically, we used program-controlled profiles to monitor, track and record spamming behaviors. We gave a detailed description of the experiment settings and then analyzed the spamming data collected by these profiles. We found that the spammers on Sina Weibo can be classified into two categories and they shared some distinguishing characteristics. These results are promising for the future study on automatically detecting and identifying spammers. Keywords-Chinese micro-blog communities, Sina weibo, spammers