WayPop Machine: A Wayback Machine to Investigate Popularity and Root Out Trolls
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Elmas, Tugrulcan; Ibanez, Thomas Romain; Hutter, Alexandre; Overdorf, Rebekah; Aberer, Karl
- Source
- 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on. :391-395 Nov, 2022
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
Visualization
Social networking (online)
Computer crime
trolls
osint
tool
data visualization
twitter
social media
social cybersecurity
online social networks
- Language
Contrary to celebrities who owe their popularity online to their activity offline, malicious users such as trolls have to gain fame on social media through the social media itself. The exact reasons that a certain user has become popular are often obscure especially when the popularity was gained illicitly through means such as fake amplification of content. In this paper, we develop a methodology for uncovering why an account has become popular and present an open source tool that encapsulates this methodology. This tool aims to aid others in uncovering malicious accounts which have artificially gained many followers and to distinguish such accounts from those which gained followers and popularity honestly.