Identification of Fake Profiles in Twitter Social Network

Online social networks are being intensively used by millions of users, Twitter being one of the most popular, as a powerful source of information with impact on opinion and decision making. However, in Twitter as in other online social networks, not all the users are legitimate, and it is not easy to detect those accounts that correspond to fake profiles. In this work in progress paper, we propose a method to help practitioners to identify fake Twitter accounts, by calculating the “fake probability” based on a weighted parameter set collected from public Twitter accounts. The preliminary results obtained with a subset of an existing annotated dataset of Twitter accounts are promising and give confidence on using this method as a decision support system, to help practitioners to identify fake profiles.