Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network

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.