Profiling the followers of the most influential and verified users on Sina Weibo

The new social media such as Twitter and Sina Weibo has become an increasingly popular channel for spreading influence, challenging traditional media such as TVs and newspapers. The most influential and verified users, also called big-V accounts on Sina Weibo often attract million of followers and fans, creating massive “celebrity-centric” social networks on the social media, which play a key role in disseminating breaking news, latest events, and controversial opinions on social issues. Given the importance of these accounts, it is very crucial to understand social networks and user influence of these accounts and profile their followers' behaviors. Towards this end, this paper monitors a selected group of influential users on Sina Weibo and collects their tweet streams as well as retweeting and commenting activities on these tweets from their followers. Our analysis on tweet data streams from Sina Weibo reveals when and what the followers comment on the tweets of these influential users, and discovers different temporal patterns and word diversity in the comments. Based on the insight gained from follower characteristics, we further develop simple and intuitive algorithms for classifying the followers into spammers and normal fans. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are able to achieve an average accuracy of 95.20% in detecting spammers from the followers who have commented on the tweets of these influential accounts.