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Deploying South African social honeypots on Twitter

Published: 26 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Inspired by the simple, yet effective, method of tweeting gibberish to attract automated social agents (bots), we attempt to create localised honeypots in the South African political context. We produce a series of defined techniques and combine them to generate interactions from users on Twitter. The paper offers two key contributions. Conceptually, an argument is made that honeypots should not be confused for bot detection methods, but are rather methods to capture low-quality users. Secondly, we successfully generate a list of 288 local low quality users active in the political context.

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SAICSIT '18: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists
September 2018
362 pages
ISBN:9781450366472
DOI:10.1145/3278681
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

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 September 2018

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  1. automated social agent detection
  2. honeypots
  3. social media

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SAICSIT '18

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Overall Acceptance Rate 159 of 377 submissions, 42%

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