Cited by 50Spam and Phishing DetectionMisinformation and Its ImpactsDigital Marketing and Social Media

Worth its Weight in Likes

Sen, Indira, Aggarwal, Anupama, Mian, Shiven, Singh, Siddharth, Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam, Datta, Anwitaman·2018·Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science

Abstract

Instagram is a significant platform for users to share media; reflecting their interests. It is used by marketers and brands to reach their potential audience for advertisement. The number of likes on posts serves as a proxy for social reputation of the users, and in some cases, social media influencers with an extensive reach are compensated by marketers to promote products. This emerging market has led to users artificially bolstering the likes they get to project an inflated social worth. In this study, we enumerate the potential factors which contribute towards a genuine like on Instagram. Based on our analysis of liking behaviour, we build an automated mechanism to detect fake likes on Instagram which achieves a high precision of 83.5%. Our work serves an important first step in reducing the effect of fake likes on Instagram influencer market.

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Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3201064.3201105

Cites

21 of 21 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • Popularity metrics can be gamed with inauthentic behavior, including bots, organized trolls, and fake-account networks.

    “Popularity metrics can also be gamed with inauthentic behavior, including bots, organized trolls, and fake-account networks (Pacheco et al., 2021; Sen et al., 2018).”

    From Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media. (2024) · cites this paper as Sen et al., 2018

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. machine learning International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. machine learning International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.

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Authors
Sen, I., Aggarwal, A., Mian, S., Singh, S., Kumaraguru, P., & Datta, A.
Affiliations
  • Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IN)
  • Nanyang Technological University (SG)
Venue
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science
Publisher
ACM
Published
2018-05-15
Pages
205-209
OpenAlex
W2804992550
Cited by
50
References
21
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 2
FWCI
4.69
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Marketing and Social Media
Keywords
Instagram, social media influencers, influencer marketing, social reputation, automated detection

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