Twitter spam detection based on deep learning

Abstract

Twitter spam has long been a critical but difficult problem to be addressed. So far, researchers have developed a series of machine learning-based methods and blacklisting techniques to detect spamming activities on Twitter. According to our investigation, current methods and techniques have achieved the accuracy of around 80%. However, due to the problems of spam drift and information fabrication, these machine-learning based methods cannot efficiently detect spam activities in real-life scenarios. Moreover, the blacklisting method cannot catch up with the variations of spamming activities as manually inspecting suspicious URLs is extremely time-consuming. In this paper, we proposed a novel technique based on deep learning techniques to address the above challenges. The syntax of each tweet will be learned through WordVector Training Mode. We then constructed a binary classifier based on the preceding representation dataset. In experiments, we collected and implemented a 10-day real Tweet datasets in order to evaluate our proposed method. We first studied the performance of different classifiers, and then compared our method to other existing text-based methods. We found that our method largely outperformed existing methods. We further compared our method to non-text-based detection techniques. According to the experiment results, our proposed method was more accurate.