Spam in Blogs and Social Media, Tutorial | CSEE Online Publication Manager

Spam on the Internet dates back over a decade, with its earliest known appearance as an email about the infamous MAKE.MONEY.FAST. campaign. Spam has co-evolved with Internet applications and is now quite common on the World-Wide Web. As social media systems such as blogs, wikis and bookmark sharing sites have emerged, spammers have quickly developed techniques to infect them as well. The very characteristics underlying the Web, be it version 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0, also enable new varieties of spam. This tutorial will detail the problem of spam in social media, with an emphasis on spam in blogs. We will discuss different types of spam, the motivation for spammers and the seriousness and nature of the problem. We will then share some of our discussions with groups facing and tackling this issue. The second half of the tutorial will present an overview of spam detection and elimination efforts with an extensive survey of detecting blog spam. The tutorial will help researchers understand the unique aspects of spam in social media, recognize how it affects analytics and information extraction, and identify current research challenges. For practitioners, it will provide strategies for controlling the problem, and identify areas of collaboration across communities.