Popularity Prediction for Social Media over Arbitrary Time Horizons
Daniel Haimovich, Dima Karamshuk, Thomas Leeper, Evgeniy Riabenko, Milan Vojnovic
USENIX Security Symposium
Online social networks (OSNs) attract attackers that use abusive accounts to conduct malicious activities for economic, political, and personal gain. In response, OSNs often deploy abusive account classifiers using machine learning (ML) approaches. However, a practical, effective ML-based defense requires carefully engineering features that are robust to adversarial manipulation, obtaining enough ground truth labeled data for model training, and designing a system that can scale to all active accounts on an OSN (potentially in the billions).
To address these challenges we present Deep Entity Classification (DEC), an ML framework that detects abusive accounts in OSNs that have evaded other, traditional abuse detection systems. We leverage the insight that while accounts in isolation may be difficult to classify, their embeddings in the social graph—the network structure, properties, and behaviors of themselves and those around them—are fundamentally difficult for attackers to replicate or manipulate at scale. Our system:
DEC has been deployed at Facebook, where it classifies all users continuously, resulting in an estimated reduction of abusive accounts on the network by 27% beyond those already detected by other, traditional methods.
Daniel Haimovich, Dima Karamshuk, Thomas Leeper, Evgeniy Riabenko, Milan Vojnovic
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