Related papers: How Impersonators Exploit Instagram to Generate Fa…
Impersonators are playing an important role in the production and propagation of the content on Online Social Networks, notably on Instagram. These entities are nefarious fake accounts that intend to disguise a legitimate account by making…
With 1.3 billion users, Instagram (IG) has also become a business tool. IG influencer marketing, expected to generate $33.25 billion in 2022, encourages companies and influencers to create trending content. Various methods have been…
We combine philosophical theories with quantitative analyses of online data to propose a sophisticated approach to social media influencers. Identifying influencers as communication systems emerging from a dialectic interactional process…
Recent years have seen a new form of advertisement campaigns emerge: those involving so-called social media influencers. These influencers accept money in return for promoting products via their social media feeds. Although this constitutes…
Fake engagement is one of the significant problems in Online Social Networks (OSNs) which is used to increase the popularity of an account in an inorganic manner. The detection of fake engagement is crucial because it leads to loss of money…
Influencer Marketing generated $16 billion in 2022. Usually, the more popular influencers are paid more for their collaborations. Thus, many services were created to boost profiles' popularity metrics through bots or fake accounts. However,…
In the contemporary era, online social networks have become integral to social life, revolutionizing the way individuals manage their social connections. While enhancing accessibility and immediacy, these networks have concurrently given…
Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up to…
This paper presents a longitudinal study of more than ten years of activity on Instagram consisting of over a million posts by 400 content creators from four countries: the US, Brazil, Netherlands and Germany. Our study shows differences in…
This paper focuses on the problem of scoring and ranking influential users of Instagram, a visual content sharing online social network (OSN). Instagram is the second largest OSN in the world with 700 million active Instagram accounts, 32%…
There has been a significant expansion in the use of online social networks (OSNs) to support people experiencing mental health issues. This paper studies the role of Instagram influencers who specialize in coaching people with mental…
Instagram is a relatively new form of communication where users can instantly share their current status by taking pictures and tweaking them using filters. It has seen a rapid growth in the number of users as well as uploads since it was…
Instagram has been increasingly used as a source of information especially among the youth. As a result, political figures now leverage the platform to spread opinions and political agenda. We here analyze online discussions on Instagram,…
Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such…
Bots are user accounts in social media which are controlled by computer programs. Similar to many other things, they are used for both good and evil purposes. One nefarious use-case for them is to spread misinformation or biased data in the…
Despite the influence that image-based communication has on online discourse, the role played by images in disinformation is still not well understood. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of fauxtography, analyzing the use…
The increased popularity and ubiquitous availability of online social networks and globalised Internet access have affected the way in which people share content. The information that users willingly disclose on these platforms can be used…
Socialbots are intelligent software controlling all the behavior of fake accounts in an online social network. They use artificial intelligence techniques to pass themselves off as human social media users. Socialbots exploit user trust to…
``Impression Zombies'', a type of malicious account designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics, have recently emerged as a significant threat on X (formerly Twitter). These accounts disseminate a high volume of low-quality,…
We present the first in-depth and large-scale study of misleading repurposing, in which a malicious user changes the identity of their social media account via, among other things, changes to the profile attributes in order to use the…