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Worth its Weight in Likes: Towards Detecting Fake Likes on Instagram

Published: 15 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Instagram is a significant platform for users to share media; reflecting their interests. It is used by marketers and brands to reach their potential audience for advertisement. The number of likes on posts serves as a proxy for social reputation of the users, and in some cases, social media influencers with an extensive reach are compensated by marketers to promote products. This emerging market has led to users artificially bolstering the likes they get to project an inflated social worth. In this study, we enumerate the potential factors which contribute towards a genuine like on Instagram. Based on our analysis of liking behaviour, we build an automated mechanism to detect fake likes on Instagram which achieves a high precision of 83.5%. Our work serves an important first step in reducing the effect of fake likes on Instagram influencer market.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '18: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science
May 2018
399 pages
ISBN:9781450355636
DOI:10.1145/3201064
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 15 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. fake social engagement
  2. instagram
  3. online social networks

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WebSci '18
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WebSci '18: 10th ACM Conference on Web Science
May 27 - 30, 2018
Amsterdam, Netherlands

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WebSci '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 113 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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