A Survey on Pedophile Attribution Techniques for Online Platforms

TL;DR

This survey reviews methods for identifying sexual predators on social media, analyzing datasets, features, and techniques, highlighting the lack of effective attribution tools and outlining open research challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of pedophile attribution techniques, their limitations, and future research directions in social media security.

Findings

Few existing tools mitigate online sexual predator risks.

Current methods lack effective suspect attribution capabilities.

Identifies open problems in pedophile attribution research.

Abstract

Reliance on anonymity in social media has increased its popularity on these platforms among all ages. The availability of public Wi-Fi networks has facilitated a vast variety of online content, including social media applications. Although anonymity and ease of access can be a convenient means of communication for their users, it is difficult to manage and protect its vulnerable users against sexual predators. Using an automated identification system that can attribute predators to their text would make the solution more attainable. In this survey, we provide a review of the methods of pedophile attribution used in social media platforms. We examine the effect of the size of the suspect set and the length of the text on the task of attribution. Moreover, we review the most-used datasets, features, classification techniques and performance measures for attributing sexual predators. We found that few studies have proposed tools to mitigate the risk of online sexual predators, but none of them can provide suspect attribution. Finally, we list several open research problems.