Worth its Weight in Likes: Towards Detecting Fake Likes on Instagram

Instagram is a significant platform for users to share media; reflecting their interests. It is used by marketers and brands to reach their potential audience for advertisement. The number of likes on posts serves as a proxy for social reputation of the users, and in some cases, social media influencers with an extensive reach are compensated by marketers to promote products. This emerging market has led to users artificially bolstering the likes they get to project an inflated social worth. In this study, we enumerate the potential factors which contribute towards a genuine like on Instagram. Based on our analysis of liking behaviour, we build an automated mechanism to detect fake likes on Instagram which achieves a high precision of 83.5%. Our work serves an important first step in reducing the effect of fake likes on Instagram influencer market.

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