Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters.

摘要

Online social media, such as news websites and community question answering (CQA) portals, have made useful information accessible to more people. However, many of online comment areas and communities are flooded with fraudulent information. These messages come from a special group of online users, called online paid posters, or termed "Internet water army" in China, represents a new type of online job opportunities.;Online paid posters get paid for posting comments or articles on different online communities and websites for hidden purpose, e.g., to influence the opinion of other people towards certain social events or business markets. Though an interesting strategy in business marketing, paid posters may create a significant negative effect on the online communities, since the information from paid posters is usually not trustworthy.;We thoroughly investigate the behavioral pattern of online paid posters based on a real-world trace data from the social comments of a business conflict. We design and validate a new detection mechanism, including both non-semantic analysis and semantic analysis, to identify potential online paid posters. Using supervised and unsupervised approaches, our test results with real-world datasets show a very promising performance.