Exploring the Anonymity of Social Media Users Using Micro-messages

Sarp Aykent, Cheryl D. Seals

Abstract: The widespread use of social media and social networking sites has transformed how people communicate. As a result, micro-messages exchanged daily by people increased drastically. The micro-messages, which limit the number of characters, are a unique way of communication. Social media users communicate publicly or privately using micro-messages. Also, social media users can use pseudo-identities to stay anonymous. The identity of the user can be revealed using author identification systems with their social media posts. The length limitation of the micro-messages introduces novel problems for author identification systems. In this work, we investigate the performance of author identification systems on micro-messages with extensive experiments. Our results demonstrate the capabilities of the author identifiers under various real-world scenarios.