Retweet Us, We Will Retweet You: Spotting Collusive Retweeters Involved in Blackmarket Services

TL;DR

This paper investigates collusive retweeters involved in blackmarket services on Twitter, developing detection models and a real-time browser extension to identify fake retweeters, thereby addressing social reputation manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dataset of blackmarket retweeters, characterizes their social behavior, and proposes a supervised detection model with a real-time browser extension.

Findings

Supervised models achieve 87% Macro F1-score in detecting customer types.

The browser extension SCoRe accurately spots fake retweeters with 85% user feedback accuracy.

Blackmarket customers exhibit distinct social behaviors from genuine users.

Abstract

Twitter has increasingly become a popular platform to share news and user opinion. A tweet is considered to be important if it receives high number of affirmative reactions from other Twitter users via Retweets. Retweet count is thus considered as a surrogate measure for positive crowd-sourced reactions - high number of retweets of a tweet aid in making its topic trending. This in turn bolsters the social reputation of the author of the tweet. Since social reputation/impact of users/tweets influences many decisions (such as promoting brands, advertisement etc.), several blackmarket syndicates have actively been engaged in producing fake retweets in a collusive manner. Users who want to boost the impact of their tweets approach the blackmarket services, and gain retweets for their own tweets by either paying money (Premium Services) or by retweeting other customers' tweets. Thus they become customers of blackmarket syndicates and engage in fake activities. Interestingly, these customers are neither bots, nor even fake users - they are usually normal human beings; they express a mix of organic and inorganic retweeting activities, and there is no synchronicity across their behaviors. In this paper, we make a first attempt to investigate such blackmarket customers engaged in producing fake retweets. We collected and annotated a novel dataset comprising of customers of many blackmarket services and show how their social behavior differs from genuine users. We then use state-of-the-art supervised models to detect three types of customers (bots, promotional, normal) and genuine users. We achieve a Macro F1-score of 0.87 with SVM, outperforming four other baselines significantly. We further design a browser extension, SCoRe which, given the link of a tweet, spots its fake retweeters in real-time. We also collected users' feedback on the performance of SCoRe and obtained 85% accuracy.