Duplicate Detection for Identifying Social Spam in Microblogs

As an important kind of social media, microblog has become an important source of opinion mining and collective behavior study. However, social spams may affect the analytical results greatly. This paper focuses on the problem of identifying potential social spammers who copy pieces of information from others. An improved locality-sensitive hashing based method is used for detecting duplicated tweets. Intensive empirical study over a real-life microblog dataset crawled from Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging services, is conducted. The characteristics of potential spammers and their behaviors are analyzed.