Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network

2012/04/16 by Saptarshi Ghosh, Bimal Viswanath, Farshad Kooti +5 · 5 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Spam and Phishing Detection #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Misinformation and Its Impacts

paper · doi:10.1145/2187836.2187846

openalex publication_date 2012/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Recently, Twitter has emerged as a popular platform for discovering real-time information on the Web, such as news stories and people's reaction to them. Like the Web, Twitter has become a target for link farming, where users, especially spammers, try to acquire large numbers of follower links in the social network. Acquiring followers not only increases the size of a user's direct audience, but also contributes to the perceived influence of the user, which in turn impacts the ranking of the user's tweets by search engines.

Cited by

• A community role approach to assess social capitalists visibility in the Twitter network
• Online Social Deception and Its Countermeasures: A Survey
• Cashtag Piggybacking
• ENWalk: Learning Network Features for Spam Detection in Twitter
• Attention economy [wikipedia]

Related

• Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
• Identifying Influential Links for Event Propagation on Twitter: A Network of Networks Approach
• The Road to Popularity: The Dilution of Growing Audience on Twitter
• ENWalk: Learning Network Features for Spam Detection in Twitter
• POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths