Reliability Index for Twitter – Twitter Handles’ Credibility Assessment

Author Name(s): Kartik Sharma, Sanjeev Dhawan, Kulvinder Singh
Author Email: kartik_s@outlook.in

Abstract

Social networks have attained a vital place in everyone’s lives by emerging as the accustomed means for social interaction among people as well as the primary medium for dissemination of information. Accordingly, these platforms also bear
the responsibility of such information being reliable and authentic. In order to endorse such information, the social networks need to vet the sources of such information which in turn means to remove or flag potentially fake accounts as well as automated bot accounts. A social network’s trustworthiness is directly proportional to its efficiency in spotting malicious accounts. In this paper, we propose a fresh approach to assign a reliability measure to every single account on Twitter. In order to compute an account’s reliability measure, we factor in certain parameters which are
paramount in ascertaining any twitter account’s trustworthiness along with their weightage which varies for every such parameter.

Keywords

Social Networks, Twitter, Fake Accounts, Sybil, Reliability Index, Account Credibility

Introduction

Social Networks being a cardinal part of our lives, bring as many threats with them as the convenience they offer. Since quite some time, social networks have befallen as the primary source of information, news, communication etc for a majority of our
population. People have started counting on social media for a range of things starting from basic social interaction to their day to day news. In this era, where social networks have emerged as the primary bridge between people, we need to consider the perils of this as well as ways to encounter those. Nowadays, anything can be found on social networks, ranging from personal posts to worldwide
news, be it factual or false. There is hardly any way to ascertain the genuineness of such information except for its source profile. Unfortunately, as of now, there is no unswerving way to establish the credibility of an account which offers any such information. In this paper, we propose an approach to do just that. We aim to provide a way to determine a social account’s trustworthiness by scrutinizing an assortment of the subject’s profile particulars. In our approach, we employ a point system for
measuring any account’s reliability in quantitative terms. Based on the resulting numerical value, we can easily determine if an account is worth our trust or not along with the degree to which we can rely on the account in question. In the subsequent
sections, we will elucidate on our approach along with the careful functioning of the same [1, 2, 3,4, 5].

Conclusion and Future Scope

Social Networks are still way behind in vanquishing the threat of fake accounts, bots (spambots etc), pseudonym accounts, impersonators etc. Our approach is merely a footstep in the course of thwarting such adversaries. It is tailor-made for Twitter and efficaciously delivers a quantifiable reliability factor of twitter handles after a careful
analysis of various parameters. The competence of our model depends on the choice of parameters and their weightage, which can be altered to formulate a more or less efficient system. In near future, our approach may be successfully applied to any social network subject to amendments in parameters and their weightage. Our research is an outcome of the contemporary need for dealing with the menaces of
fraudulent account and information. There have been numerous efforts in this area of research but none of them have been full proof, which calls for more focus in this prominent area of research.

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