Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network

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. In this paper, we first investigate link farming in the Twit-ter network and then explore mechanisms to discourage the activity. To this end, we conducted a detailed analysis of links acquired by over 40,000 spammer accounts suspended by Twitter. We find that link farming is wide-spread and that a majority of spammers ’ links are farmed from a small fraction of Twitter users, the social capitalists, who are themselves seeking to amass social capital and links by fol-lowing back anyone who would follow them. Our findings shed light on the social dynamics that are at the root of the link farming problem in Twitter network and they have im-portant implications for future designs of link spam defenses. In particular, we show that a simple user ranking scheme that penalizes users for connecting to spammers can effec-tively address the problem by disincentivizing users from linking with unknown people to gain influence. 1