Revealing the Blackmarket Retweet Game: A Hybrid Approach

Shreyash Arya, Hridoy Sankar Dutta

Abstract: The advent of online social networks has led to a significant spread of important news and opinions. In the case of Twitter, the popularity of a tweet is measured by the number of retweets it gains. A significant number of retweets help to broadcast a tweet well and makes the topic of the tweet popular. Individuals and organizations involved in product launches, promotional events, etc. look for a broader reach in their audience and approach blackmarket services. These services artificially provide a gain in retweets of a tweet as the retweets’ natural increase is difficult and time-consuming. We refer to such tweets as collusive tweets. Users who submit their tweets to the blackmarket services gain artificial boosting to their social growth and appear credible to the end-users, leading to false promotions and campaigns. Existing methods are mostly centered around the problem of detection of fake, fraudulent, and spam activities. Thus, detecting collusive tweets is an important yet challenging problem that is not yet well understood.