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Revealing and Detecting Malicious Retweeter Groups

Retweeting/sharing action has enabled information to be cascaded to distant nodes on social network. Unfortunately, malicious users as a group have taken advantage of the retweeting function with coordinated behavior to falsely distort the volume of specific keywords, topics or URLs for promotional purposes (e.g., spreading fake news, and increasing public visibility of products or services). Unfortunately, little is known about their retweeting behavior as a group and how to detect them based on group-based signals. To fill the gap, in this paper, we (i) propose Attractor+ algorithm to extract retweeter groups, members of each of which have similar retweeting behavior; (ii) analyze underlying characteristics of malicious and legitimate retweeter groups; (iii) propose group-based features to catch synchronized and coordinated behavior; and build a predictor to classify if a group is malicious. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperformed existing approaches.