Fake Instagram Profile Identification and Classification using Machine Learning
Preethi Harris, J Gojal, R. Chitra, S Anithra
Abstract
With the increase in Internet usage, Instagram is now considered a very important platform for advertising marketing and social interaction. It is used by millions of users but, some users tend to misuse the platform by creating false identities. In recent years though Internet is a boon, online social networks are susceptible to threats by cyber criminals and spammers. Moreover, the popularity of social media users is determined by followers and hence users resort to different wrong means to promote increased profile followers. Researchers has offered a lot of feasible solutions for social media applications. In this paper, the automatic detection of fake profiles has been proposed to identify fake Instagram profiles so that the social life of Instagram users is secure. The prediction of fake Instagram profiles is facilitated using supervised learning machine algorithms. Upon classification, fake profile IDs are stored in a data dictionary to further help the concerned authorities to take necessary actions against fraudulent social media profiles. Experimentation has been done to compare the classification algorithms used to train the dataset.