The Pod People: Understanding Manipulation of Social Media Popularity via Reciprocity Abuse
The Pod People: Understanding Manipulation of Social Media Popularity via Reciprocity Abuse
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DOI：
10.1145/3366423.3380256
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发表时间：
2020-04
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Janith Weerasinghe;Bailey Flanigan;Aviel J. Stein;Damon McCoy;R. Greenstadt
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作者：
Janith Weerasinghe;Bailey Flanigan;Aviel J. Stein;Damon McCoy;R. Greenstadt
在线社交网络 (OSN) 用户提高帐户受欢迎程度的需求推动了地下生态系统的创建，该生态系统提供服务或技术来帮助用户操纵内容管理算法。最近出现的一种颠覆方法是当用户形成称为 Pod 的组时，以促进互惠滥用，其中每个成员与组中其他成员发布的内容相互交互。我们收集了 180 万条 Instagram 帖子，这些帖子发布在 Telegram 托管的 Pod 中。我们首先总结了这些 Pod 的属性以及它们的使用方式，发现它们很容易通过 Google 搜索发现，并且进入门槛较低。然后，我们创建了两个机器学习模型来检测通过两种不同类型的 Pod 获得交互的 Instagram 帖子，分别达到 0.91 和 0.94 AUC。最后，我们发现 Pod 是提高用户 Instagram 受欢迎程度的有效工具，我们估计 Pod 的使用会导致用户后续帖子的有机评论互动水平显着增加。
Online Social Network (OSN) Users’ demand to increase their account popularity has driven the creation of an underground ecosystem that provides services or techniques to help users manipulate content curation algorithms. One method of subversion that has recently emerged occurs when users form groups, called pods, to facilitate reciprocity abuse, where each member reciprocally interacts with content posted by other members of the group. We collect 1.8 million Instagram posts that were posted in pods hosted on Telegram. We first summarize the properties of these pods and how they are used, uncovering that they are easily discoverable by Google search and have a low barrier to entry. We then create two machine learning models for detecting Instagram posts that have gained interaction through two different kinds of pods, achieving 0.91 and 0.94 AUC, respectively. Finally, we find that pods are effective tools for increasing users’ Instagram popularity, we estimate that pod utilization leads to a significantly increased level of likely organic comment interaction on users’ subsequent posts.