Twitter Spam Detection: A Systematic Review

Abstract: Nowadays, with the rise of Internet access and mobile devices around the globe, more people are using social networks for collaboration and receiving real-time information. Twitter, the microblogging that is becoming a critical source of communication and news propagation, has grabbed the attention of spammers to distract users. So far, researchers have introduced various defense techniques to detect spams and combat spammer activities on Twitter. To overcome this problem, in recent years, many novel techniques have been offered by researchers, which have greatly enhanced the spam detection performance. Therefore, it raises a motivation to conduct a systematic review about different approaches of spam detection on Twitter. This review focuses on comparing the existing research techniques on Twitter spam detection systematically. Literature review analysis reveals that most of the existing methods rely on Machine Learning-based algorithms. Among these Machine Learning algorithms, the major differences are related to various feature selection methods. Hence, we propose a taxonomy based on different feature selection methods and analyses, namely content analysis, user analysis, tweet analysis, network analysis, and hybrid analysis. Then, we present numerical analyses and comparative studies on current approaches, coming up with open challenges that help researchers develop solutions in this topic.