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Fake it till you make it: Fishing for Catfishes

Published: 31 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Many adult content websites incorporate social networking features. Although these are popular, they raise significant challenges, including the potential for users to "catfish", i.e., to create fake profiles to deceive other users. This paper takes an initial step towards automated catfish detection. We explore the characteristics of the different age and gender groups, identifying a number of distinctions. Through this, we train models based on user profiles and comments, via the ground truth of specially verified profiles. When applying our models for age and gender estimation to unverified profiles, 38% of profiles are classified as lying about their age, and 25% are predicted to be lying about their gender. The results suggest that women have a greater propensity to catfish than men. Our preliminary work has notable implications on operators of such online social networks, as well as users who may worry about interacting with catfishes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASONAM '17: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017
July 2017
698 pages
ISBN:9781450349932
DOI:10.1145/3110025
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]

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Published: 31 July 2017

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  • (2023)Emoji are Effective Predictors of User’s DemographicsProceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1145/3625007.3629129(784-792)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
  • (2022)The Role of Trustworthiness Facets for Developing Social Media Applications: A Structured Literature ReviewInformation10.3390/info1301003413:1(34)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2022
  • (2021)The Ethics of Web Crawling and Web Scraping in Cybercrime Research: Navigating Issues of Consent, Privacy, and Other Potential Harms Associated with Automated Data CollectionResearching Cybercrimes10.1007/978-3-030-74837-1_22(435-456)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2021
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  • (2018)Adult content in social live streaming servicesProceedings of the 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.5555/3382225.3382304(375-382)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2018
  • (2018)Adult Content in Social Live Streaming Services: Characterizing Deviant Users and Relationships2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508246(375-382)Online publication date: Aug-2018

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