Devils, Angels, and Robots: Tempting Destructive Users in Social Media

Abstract

Social media sites derive their value by providing a popular and dependable community for participants to engage, share, and interact. This community value and related services like search and advertising are threatened by spammers, content polluters, and malware disseminators. In an effort to preserve community value and ensure long-term success, we present a prototype system for automatically detecting and profiling destructive users in social media. We described the architecture of the system - inspired by the "broken windows" theory embraced by law enforcement - the results and insights gained from a preliminary study conducted to determine the efficacy of our approach, and a discussion of our ongoing research.