No abstract

The widespread use of social networks has caused these platforms to become the target of malicious people. Although social networks have their own spam detection systems, these systems sometimes may not prevent spams in their social networks. Spam contents and messages threaten the security and performance of users of these networks. A spam account detection framework based on three components is proposed in this study. Short link analysis, machine learning and text analysis are the components used together in the proposed framework. First, a dataset was created for this purpose and the attributes of spam accounts were determined. Later, the hyperlinks in the messages in this dataset were analyzed through link analysis component. The machine learning component was modelled through attributes. Moreover, the messages of the social network users were analyzed through text analysis method. A web-based application of the proposed model was put into practice. As a result of the experimental studies carried out thanks to the framework, it was determined that the proposed framework showed a performance of 95.69 %. The success of this article was calculated according to the F-measure and precision evaluation metrics under the influence of sensitive content rate. It is aimed to detect spam accounts on social network and the spam detection policy of these networks is intended to support.

Background Social networks are large platforms that allow their users to interact with each other on the Internet. Today, the widespread use of social networks has made them vulnerable to malicious use through different methods such as fake accounts and spam. As a result, many social network users are exposed to the harmful effects of spam accounts created by malicious people. Although Twitter, one of the most popular social networking platforms, uses spam filters to protect its users from the harmful effects of spam, these filters are insufficient to detect spam accounts that exhibit new methods and behaviours. That’s why on social networking platforms like Twitter, it has become a necessity to use robust and more dynamic methods to detect spam accounts. Methods Fuzzy logic (FL) based approaches, as they are the models such that generate results by interpreting the data obtained based on heuristics viewpoint according to past experiences, they can provide robust and dynamic solutions in spam detection, as in many application areas. For this purpose, a data set was created by collecting data on the twitter platform for spam detection. In the study, fuzzy logic-based classification approaches are suggested for spam detection. In the first stage of the proposed method, a data set with extracted attributes was obtained by applying normalization and crowdsourcing approaches to the raw data obtained from Twitter. In the next stage, as a process of the data preprocessing step, six attributes in the binary form in the data set were subjected to a rating-based transformation and combined with the other real-valued attribute to create a database to be used in spam detection. Classification process inputs were obtained by applying the fisher-score method, one of the commonly used filter-based methods, to the data set obtained in the second stage. In the last stage, the data were classified based on FL based approaches according to the obtained inputs. As FL approaches, four different Mamdani and Sugeno fuzzy inference systems based on interval type-1 and Interval Type-2 were used. Finally, in the classification phase, four different machine learning (ML) approaches including support vector machine (SVM), Bayesian point machine (BPM), logistic regression (LR) and average perceptron (Avr Prc) methods were used to test the effectiveness of these approaches in detecting spam. Results Experimental results were obtained by applying different FL and ML based approaches on the data set created in the study. As a result of the experiments, the Interval Type-2 Mamdani fuzzy inference system (IT2M-FIS) provided the highest performance with an accuracy of 0.955, a recall of 0.967, an F-score 0.962 and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.971. However, it has been observed that FL-based spam models have a higher performance than ML-based spam models in terms of metrics including accuracy, recall, F-score and AUC values.