CrowdTarget: Target-based Detection of Crowdturfing in Online Social Networks

Malicious crowdsourcing, also known as crowdturfing, has become an important security problem. However, detecting accounts performing crowdturfing tasks is challenging because human workers manage the crowdturfing accounts such that their characteristics are similar with the characteristics of normal accounts. In this paper, we propose a novel crowdturfing detection method, called CrowdTarget, that aims to detect target objects of crowdturfing tasks (e.g., post, page, and URL) not accounts performing the tasks. We identify that the manipulation patterns of target objects by crowdturfing workers are unique features to distinguish them from normal objects. We apply CrowdTarget to detect collusion-based crowdturfing services to manipulate account popularity on Twitter with artificial retweets. Evaluation results show that CrowdTarget can accurately distinguish tweets receiving crowdturfing retweets from normal tweets. When we fix the false-positive rate at 0.01, the best truepositive rate is up to 0.98.