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  • 1705.06530v1

    Rights statement: © ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ASONAM '17 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3110025.3110075

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Fake it till you make it: Fishing for Catfishes

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Publication date31/07/2017
Host publicationASONAM '17 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM
Pages497-504
Number of pages8
ISBN (print)9781450349932
<mark>Original language</mark>English

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. Applying our models for age and gender estimation of unverified profiles, we identify 38% of profiles who are likely lying about their age, and 25% who are likely lying about their gender. We find that women have a greater propensity to catfish than men. Further, whereas women catfish select from a wide age range, men consistently lie about being younger. Our work has notable implications on operators of such online social networks, as well as users who may worry about interacting with catfishes.

Bibliographic note

© ACM, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in ASONAM '17 Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3110025.3110075