Adversarial Collusion on the Web: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Abstract

The growth and popularity of online media has made it the most important platform for collaboration and communication among its users. Given its tremendous growth, social reputation of an entity in online media plays an important role. This has led to users choosing artificial ways to gain social reputation by means of blackmarket services as the natural way to boost social reputation is time-consuming. We refer to such artificial ways of boosting social reputation as collusion. In this tutorial, we will comprehensively review recent developments in analyzing and detecting collusive entities on online media. First, we give an overview of the problem and motivate the need to detect these entities. Second, we survey the state-of-the-art models that range from designing feature-based methods to more complex models, such as using deep learning architectures and advanced graph concepts. Third, we detail the annotation guidelines, provide a description of tools/applications and explain the publicly available datasets. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of future trends.