Detecting Non-Cooperative User Behavior in Online Social Networks

A number of online video social networks, out of which YouTube is the most popular, provides features that allow users to post a video as a response to a discussion topic. These features open opportunities] for users to introduce polluted content into the system. For instance, spammers may post an unrelated video as response to a popular one aiming at increasing the likelihood of the response being viewed by a larger number of users. Moreover, opportunistic users - promoters - may try to gain visibility to a specific video by posting a large number of (potentially unrelated) responses to boost the rank of the responded video, making it appear in the top lists maintained by the system. In this talk, I will present some of our initial results on detecting spammers and content promoters on YouTube. Our study is based on a characterization of several properties associated with YouTube users as well as the use of state-of-the-art classification algorithms.