Fake profiles on Twitter will have their days numbered with “The Fake Project“, an initiative by the CNR to identify fake accounts. It is also possible to participate in the research, here’s how.
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Fight against fake profiles on Twitter: it is the CNR of Pisa that is launching this campaign, aimed at scientifically identifying fake accounts on the social microblogging platform.
The project is called “The Fake Project” and the related account to follow is @TheFakeProject, through which you can also collaborate to report that your profile is real and not the result of automatic systems or special agencies that create fake accounts for various purposes.
The researchers from Pisa will in fact monitor @TheFakeProject, in order to note incoming tweets with the hashtag “#ImNotAFake“: in this way, the signal of the actual “good nature” of one’s account will be given and at the same time, researchers will be authorized to statistically use the data relating to the number of followers or tweets sent, so as to aggregate them with all the others and draw conclusions for their research.
No potential privacy issues: the researchers will use only and exclusively the numbers that Twitter itself makes public, without going to extract other data.
The goal is indeed to create an algorithm capable of scientifically identifying fake profiles on Twitter: as Marinella Petrocchi, one of the researchers involved, admits, it is certainly not the first time that attempts have been made to study Twitter and accounts that are actually nothing more than bots.
This time, however, the premise is different: the hunt will not be for accounts that send spam but for profiles that never send messages and which “serve to increase the number of followers”.
By already having a good number of certainly real and active accounts, used by people and not by programs, the researchers will be able to develop the detection algorithm, specifying right away that it is not certain that it will be the most precise system used, but at least it will be possible to start by enumerating the results of the various methods used.
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