Fake accounts detection on social media using stack ensemble system

Abstract

In today’s world, social media has spread widely, and the social life of people have become deeply associated with social media use. They use it to communicate with each other, share events and news, and even run businesses. The huge growth in social media and the massive number of users has lured attackers to distribute harmful content through fake accounts, leading to a large number of people falling victim to those accounts. In this work, we propose a mechanism for identifying fake accounts on the social media site Twitter by using two methods to preprocess data and extract the most effective features, they are the spearman correlation coefficient and the chi-square test. For classification, we used supervised machine learning algorithms based on the ensemble system (stack method) by using random forest, support vector machine, and Naive Bayes algorithms in the first level of the stack, and the logistic regression algorithm as a meta classifier. The stack ensemble system was shown to be effective in achieving the best results when compared to the algorithms used with it, with data accuracy reaching 99%.