skip to main content
10.1145/2660460.2660467acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescosnConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog": a twitter case study of anonymity in social networks

Published: 01 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Twitter does not impose a Real-Name policy for usernames, giving users the freedom to choose how they want to be identified. This results in some users being Identifiable (disclosing their full name) and some being Anonymous (disclosing neither their first nor last name).
In this work we perform a large-scale analysis of Twitter to study the prevalence and behavior of Anonymous and Identifiable users. We employ Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to classify Twitter users as Highly Identifiable, Identifiable, Partially Anonymous, and Anonymous. We find that a significant fraction of accounts are Anonymous or Partially Anonymous, demonstrating the importance of Anonymity in Twitter. We then select several broad topic categories that are widely considered sensitive--including pornography, escort services, sexual orientation, religious and racial hatred, online drugs, and guns--and find that there is a correlation between content sensitivity and a user's choice to be anonymous. Finally, we find that Anonymous users are generally less inhibited to be active participants, as they tweet more, lurk less, follow more accounts, and are more willing to expose their activity to the general public. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to conduct a large-scale data-driven analysis of user anonymity in online social networks.

References

[1]
Child pornography via Tweet: pedophiles abuse Twitter as a distribution channel. http://www.naiin.org/en/news/Child-pornography-via-Tweet-pedophiles-abuse-Twitter-as-a-distribution-channel-75.html.
[2]
Create your Google + profile name. https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1228271?hl=en. Accessed: Feb 8th, 2014.
[3]
Facebook's Name Policy. https://www.facebook.com/help/292517374180078. Accessed: Feb 8th, 2014.
[4]
A. Acquisti, R. Dingledine, and P. Syverson. On the economics of anonymity. In Financial Cryptography, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003.
[5]
M. S. Bernstein, A. Monroy-Hernández, D. Harry, P. André, K. Panovich, and G. G. Vargas. 4chan and/b: An analysis of anonymity and ephemerality in a large online community. In Proceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2011.
[6]
V. Blue. Forced Google Plus integration on YouTube backfires, petition hits 112,000. http://www.zdnet.com/forced-google-plus-integration-on-youtube-backfires-petition-hits-112000-7000023196/.
[7]
A. Campan and T. Truta. Data and structural k-anonymity in social networks. In Proceedings of Privacy, Security, and Trust in KDD, 2009.
[8]
C. Castillo, M. Mendoza, and B. Poblete. Information credibility on twitter. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2011.
[9]
M. Cha, H. Haddadi, F. Benevenuto, and K. Gummadi. Measuring user influence in twitter: The million follower fallacy. In Proceedings of 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2010.
[10]
T. Chesney and D. K. Su. The impact of anonymity on weblog credibility. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 68(10), 2010.
[11]
T. Connolly, L. M. Jessup, and J. S. Valacich. Effects of anonymity and evaluative tone on idea generation in computer-mediated groups. Management Science, 36(6), 1990.
[12]
B. Dowell. Rise in defamation cases involving blogs and Twitter. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/26/defamation-cases-twitter-blogs.
[13]
C. GAYLORD. Facebook's Forgotten Rule: No Fake Names Allowed. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebooks-forgotten-rule-fake-names-allowed/story?id=15509496.
[14]
D. GEERE. Twitter spread misinformation faster than truth in UK riots. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-08/09/twitter-misinformation-riots.
[15]
O. Goga, H. Lei, S. H. K. Parthasarathi, G. Friedland, R. Sommer, and R. Teixeira. Exploiting innocuous activity for correlating users across sites. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2013.
[16]
V. Gómez, A. Kaltenbrunner, and V. López. Statistical analysis of the social network and discussion threads in slashdot. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2008.
[17]
C. Grier, K. Thomas, V. Paxson, and M. Zhang. @spam: The underground on 140 characters or less. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2010.
[18]
P. Gupta, A. Goel, J. Lin, A. Sharma, D. Wang, and R. Zadeh. Wtf: The who to follow service at twitter. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2013.
[19]
D. Irani, S. Webb, K. Li, and C. Pu. Large online social footprints--an emerging threat. In Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), 2009.
[20]
P. Jain, P. Kumaraguru, and A. Joshi. @I Seek 'Fb.Me': Identifying Users Across Multiple Online Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (WWW Companion), 2013.
[21]
A. Java, X. Song, T. Finin, and B. Tseng. Why we twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis, 2007.
[22]
A. Jeffries. Facebook's fake-name fight grows as users skirt the rules. http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/17/3322436/facebook-fake-name-pseudonym-middle-name.
[23]
L. M. Jessup, T. Connolly, and J. Galegher. The effects of anonymity on gdss group process with an idea-generating task. MIS Q., 14(3), 1990.
[24]
R. Kang, S. Brown, and S. Kiesler. Why do people seek anonymity on the internet?: informing policy and design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2013.
[25]
A. Kavanaugh, S. Yang, S. Sheetz, L. T. Li, and E. Fox. Microblogging in crisis situations: Mass protests in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt. In Workshop on Transnational Human-Computer Interaction, CHI, 2011.
[26]
S. Knafo and J. Bialer. How Twitter Handles Piracy -- An Inside Look. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/how-twitter-handles-piracy_n_1251167.html.
[27]
M. Korayem and D. J. Crandall. De-anonymizing users across heterogeneous social computing platforms. In Proceedings of 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2013.
[28]
H. Kwak, C. Lee, H. Park, and S. Moon. What is twitter, a social network or a news media? In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2010.
[29]
Y. Lelkes, J. A. Krosnick, D. M. Marx, C. M. Judd, and B. Park. Complete anonymity compromises the accuracy of self-reports. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(6), 2012.
[30]
J. Liu, F. Zhang, X. Song, Y.-I. Song, C.-Y. Lin, and H.-W. Hon. What's in a name?: an unsupervised approach to link users across communities. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2013.
[31]
N. Lomas. Facebook Users Must Be Allowed To Use Pseudonyms, Says German Privacy Regulator; Real-Name Policy 'Erodes Online Freedoms'. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/18/facebook-users-must-be-allowed-to-use-pseudonyms-says-german-privacy-regulator-real-name-policy-erodes-online-freedoms/.
[32]
A. Malhotra, L. C. Totti, W. M. Jr., P. Kumaraguru, and V. Almeida. Studying user footprints in different online social networks. CoRR, abs/1301.6870, 2013.
[33]
E. Munoz. NYPD Twitter campaign implodes, flooded with photos of police abuse. http://rt.com/usa/154120-nypd-hashtag-twitter-police/.
[34]
E. Mustafaraj, P. T. Metaxas, S. Finn, and A. Monroy-Hernández. Hiding in plain sight: A tale of trust and mistrust inside a community of citizen reporters. In Proceedings of 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2012.
[35]
A. Narayanan and V. Shmatikov. De-anonymizing social networks. In Proceedings of 30th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, 2009.
[36]
S. T. Peddinti, A. Korolova, E. Bursztein, and G. Sampemane. Cloak and swagger: Understanding data sensitivity through the lens of user anonymity. In Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, 2014.
[37]
M. Pennacchiotti and A.-M. Popescu. A machine learning approach to twitter user classification. In Proceedings of 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2011.
[38]
D. Perito, C. Castelluccia, M. Kaafar, and P. Manils. How unique and traceable are usernames? In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). 2011.
[39]
T. Postmes, R. Spears, K. Sakhel, and D. de Groot. Social influence in computer-mediated communication: The effects of anonymity on group behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(10), 2001.
[40]
K. P. Puttaswamy, A. Sala, and B. Y. Zhao. Starclique: Guaranteeing user privacy in social networks against intersection attacks. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), 2009.
[41]
K. Thomas, C. Grier, D. Song, and V. Paxson. Suspended accounts in retrospect: An analysis of twitter spam. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2011.
[42]
P. A. Thompsen and D.-K. Ahn. To be or not to be: An exploration of e-prime, copula deletion and flaming in electronic mail. In ETC: A Review of General Semantics;Summer92, Vol. 49 Issue 2, p146, 1992.
[43]
J. Vosecky, D. Hong, and V. Shen. User identification across multiple social networks. In Proceedings of First International Conference on Networked Digital Technologies (NDT), 2009.
[44]
D. Wiener-Bronner. Twitter Is the Preferred Social Media Platform Among Terrorists. http://www.businessinsider.com/terror-groups-twitter-2014-5.
[45]
G. Wondracek, T. Holz, E. Kirda, and C. Kruegel. A practical attack to de-anonymize social network users. In Proceedings of 31st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, 2010.
[46]
R. Zafarani and H. Liu. Connecting corresponding identities across communities. In Proceedings of 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2009.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)The virtual disengagement hypothesis: A neurophysiological framework for reduced empathy on social mediaCognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience10.3758/s13415-024-01212-w24:6(965-971)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
  • (2024)The Pursuit of Approval: Social Media Users’ Decreased Posting Latency Following Online Exclusion as a Form of Acknowledgment-Seeking BehaviorPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin10.1177/01461672241297824Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
  • (2024)ReSPect: Enabling Active and Scalable Responses to Networked Online HarassmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373948:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog": a twitter case study of anonymity in social networks

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    COSN '14: Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Online social networks
    October 2014
    288 pages
    ISBN:9781450331982
    DOI:10.1145/2660460
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 01 October 2014

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. anonymity
    2. behavioral analysis
    3. online social networks
    4. quantify
    5. twitter

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    Conference

    COSN'14
    Sponsor:
    COSN'14: Conference on Online Social Networks
    October 1 - 2, 2014
    Dublin, Ireland

    Acceptance Rates

    COSN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 87 submissions, 29%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 307 submissions, 22%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)199
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)18
    Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)The virtual disengagement hypothesis: A neurophysiological framework for reduced empathy on social mediaCognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience10.3758/s13415-024-01212-w24:6(965-971)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2024
    • (2024)The Pursuit of Approval: Social Media Users’ Decreased Posting Latency Following Online Exclusion as a Form of Acknowledgment-Seeking BehaviorPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin10.1177/01461672241297824Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
    • (2024)ReSPect: Enabling Active and Scalable Responses to Networked Online HarassmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373948:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
    • (2024)Mitigating Barriers to Public Social Interaction with Meronymous CommunicationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642241(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Observer Effect in Social Media UseProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642078(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Civil or Uncivil: Seeing the Role of User Actors and Providing Comments on Social Media2024 21st International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology (ECTI-CON)10.1109/ECTI-CON60892.2024.10594939(1-6)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
    • (2024)Frequency and categorization of presleep fantasiesScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-83642-714:1Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Persona preserving reputation protocol (P2RP) for enhanced security, privacy, and trust in blockchain oraclesCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-023-04222-427:4(3945-3956)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
    • (2023)When research is the context: Cross-platform user expectations for social media data reuseBig Data & Society10.1177/2053951723116410810:1Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
    • (2023)A board of one’s own: Interviewing the anonymous female imageboard communityNew Media & Society10.1177/1461444823115482526:11(6510-6532)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media