English

Large-scale analysis of grooming in modern social networks

Social and Information Networks 2020-04-20 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Social networks are evolving to engage their users more by providing them with more functionalities. One of the most attracting ones is streaming. Users may broadcast part of their daily lives to thousands of others world-wide and interact with them in real-time. Unfortunately, this feature is reportedly exploited for grooming. In this work, we provide the first in-depth analysis of this problem for social live streaming services. More precisely, using a dataset that we collected, we identify predatory behaviours and grooming on chats that bypassed the moderation mechanisms of the LiveMe, the service under investigation. Beyond the traditional text approaches, we also investigate the relevance of emojis in this context, as well as the user interactions through the gift mechanisms of LiveMe. Finally, our analysis indicates the possibility of grooming towards minors, showing the extent of the problem in such platforms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.08205,
  title  = {Large-scale analysis of grooming in modern social networks},
  author = {Nikolaos Lykousas and Constantinos Patsakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.08205},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Pre-print. Under Review. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1911.08370 by other authors