Efficient Representation of Interaction Patterns with Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering for Classification of Users on Twitter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hyperbolic hierarchical clustering method to effectively identify and classify suspicious user interaction patterns on Twitter, especially during the 2019 Indian elections, with high accuracy.

Contribution

The work presents a novel feature extraction framework combined with Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering to detect insidious communities and classify user types on social media.

Findings

Achieved up to 93% F1 score in user classification.

Effectively distinguished between regular, suspended, and deleted users.

Demonstrated the utility of hyperbolic embedding for community detection.

Abstract

Social media platforms play an important role in democratic processes. During the 2019 General Elections of India, political parties and politicians widely used Twitter to share their ideals, advocate their agenda and gain popularity. Twitter served as a ground for journalists, politicians and voters to interact. The organic nature of these interactions can be upended by malicious accounts on Twitter, which end up being suspended or deleted from the platform. Such accounts aim to modify the reach of content by inorganically interacting with particular handles. These interactions are a threat to the integrity of the platform, as such activity has the potential to affect entire results of democratic processes. In this work, we design a feature extraction framework which compactly captures potentially insidious interaction patterns. Our proposed features are designed to bring out communities amongst the users that work to boost the content of particular accounts. We use Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering (HypHC) which represents the features in the hyperbolic manifold to further separate such communities. HypHC gives the added benefit of representing these features in a lower dimensional space -- thus serving as a dimensionality reduction technique. We use these features to distinguish between different classes of users that emerged in the aftermath of the 2019 General Elections of India. Amongst the users active on Twitter during the elections, 2.8% of the users participating were suspended and 1% of the users were deleted from the platform. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed features in differentiating between regular users (users who were neither suspended nor deleted), suspended users and deleted users. By leveraging HypHC in our pipeline, we obtain F1 scores of upto 93%.