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 of all worldwide Internet users. Among the millions of users, photos shared by more influential users are viewed by more users than posts shared by less influential counterparts. This raises the question of how to identify those influential Instagram users. In our work, we present and discuss the lack of relevant tools and insufficient metrics for influence measurement, focusing on a network oblivious approach and show that the graph-based approach used in other OSNs is a poor fit for Instagram. In our study, we consider user statistics, some of which are more intuitive than others, and several regression models to measure users' influence.
This situation raises the question of how to rank users in OSNs. As OSNs are traditionally described as graphs, ranking has been done using various graph statistics, from simple in out degree to node closeness @cite_17 @cite_28 , as is the case with the work of Anger and Kittl in Twitter @cite_10 and in the context of influential blogs @cite_20 . Other techniques extend to existing link analysis algorithms - the most popular one being PageRank @cite_38 @cite_43 . suggested twitterRank @cite_42 and introduced starRank @cite_16 , both extensions of PageRank working on Twitter's follower and engagements graphs, respectively. On LinkedIn, a professional OSN, Budalakoti and Bekkerman suggested a fair-bets model for ranking via transfer of authority @cite_2 , and on Instagram Egger suggested a PageRank extension for influencer ranking @cite_21 .
@cite_38 @cite_28 @cite_42 @cite_21 @cite_43 @cite_2 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_17
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We consider the problem of identifying the most respected, authoritative members of a large-scale online social network (OSN) by constructing a global ranked list of its members. The problem is distinct from the problem of identifying influencers: we are interested in identifying members who are influential in the real world, even when not necessarily so on the OSN. We focus on two sources for information about user authority: (a) invitations to connect, which are usually sent to people whom the inviter respects, and (b) members' browsing behavior, as profiles of more important people are viewed more often than others'. We construct two directed graphs over the same set of nodes (representing member profiles): the invitation graph and the navigation graph respectively. We show that the standard PageRank algorithm, a baseline in web page ranking, is not effective in people ranking, and develop a social capital based model, called the fair bets model, as a viable solution. We then propose a novel approach, called bimodal fair bets, for combining information from two (or more) endorsement graphs drawn from the same OSN, by simultaneously using the authority scores of nodes in one graph to inform the other, and vice versa, in a mutually reinforcing fashion. We evaluate the ranking results on the LinkedIn social network using this model, where members who have Wikipedia profiles are assumed to be authoritative. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the baseline approach by a large margin. Extensive research has been conducted on top of online social networks (OSNs), while little attention has been paid to the data collection process. Due to the large scale of OSNs and their privacy control policies, a partial data set is often used for analysis. The data set analyzed is decided by many factors including the choice of seeds, node selection algorithms, and the sample size. These factors may introduce biases and further contaminate or even skew the results. To evaluate the impact of different factors, this paper examines the OSN graph crawling problem, where the nodes are OSN users and the edges are the links (or relationship) among these users. More specifically, by looking at various factors in the crawling process, the following problems are addressed in this paper:* Efficiency: How fast different crawlers discover nodes links;* Sensitivity: How different OSNs and the number of protected users affect crawlers;* Bias: How major graph properties are skewed.To the best of our knowledge, our simulations on four real world online social graphs provide the first in-depth empirical answers to these questions. In the last decade, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have taken the world by storm. They range from superficial to professional, from focused to general-purpose, and, from free-form to highly structured. Numerous people have multiple accounts within the same OSN and even more people have an account on more than one OSN. Since all OSNs involve some amount of user input, often in written form, it is natural to consider whether multiple incarnations of the same person in various OSNs can be effectively correlated or linked. One intuitive means of linking accounts is by using stylometric analysis. This paper reports on (what we believe to be) the first trilateral large-scale stylometric OSN linkability study. Its outcome has important implications for OSN privacy. The study is trilateral since it involves three OSNs with very different missions: (1) Yelp, known primarily for its user-contributed reviews of various venues, e.g, dining and entertainment, (2) Twitter, popular for its pithy general-purpose micro-blogging style, and (3) Flickr, used exclusively for posting and labeling (describing) photographs. As our somewhat surprising results indicate, stylometric linkability of accounts across these heterogeneous OSNs is both viable and quite effective. The main take-away of this work is that, despite OSN heterogeneity, it is very challenging for one person to maintain privacy across multiple active accounts on different OSNs. Twitter's popularity has fostered the emergence of various illegal user activities - one such activity is to artificially bolster visibility of tweets by gaining large number of retweets within a short time span. The natural way to gain visibility is time-consuming. Therefore, users who want their tweets to get quick visibility try to explore shortcuts - one such shortcut is to approach the blackmarket services, and gain retweets for their own tweets by retweeting other customers' tweets. Thus the users intrinsically become a part of a collusive ecosystem controlled by these services. In this paper, we propose CoReRank, an unsupervised framework to detect collusive users (who are involved in producing artificial retweets), and suspicious tweets (which are submitted to the blackmarket services) simultaneously. CoReRank leverages the retweeting (or quoting) patterns of users, and measures two scores - the 'credibility' of a user and the 'merit' of a tweet. We propose a set of axioms to derive the interdependency between these two scores, and update them in a recursive manner. The formulation is further extended to handle the cold start problem. CoReRank is guaranteed to converge in a finite number of iterations and has linear time complexity. We also propose a semi-supervised version of CoReRank (called CoReRank+) which leverages a partial ground-truth labeling of users and tweets. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the superiority of CoReRank compared to six baselines on a novel dataset we collected and annotated. CoReRank beats the best unsupervised baseline method by 269 (20 ) (relative) average precision and 300 (22.22 ) (relative) average recall in detecting collusive (genuine) users. CoReRank+ beats the best supervised baseline method by 33.18 AUC. CoReRank also detects suspicious tweets with 0.85 (0.60) average precision (recall). To our knowledge, CoReRank is the first unsupervised method to detect collusive users and suspicious tweets simultaneously with theoretical guarantees.