SiMAIM: identifying sockpuppets and puppetmasters on a single forum-oriented social media site

With the Internet becoming indispensable in our lives, social media has become an integral part of our lives. However, with this has come the phenomenon of a single user registering multiple accounts (sockpuppets) to advertise, spam, or cause controversy on social media sites, where the user is called the puppetmaster. This phenomenon is even more evident on forum-oriented social media sites. Identifying sockpuppets is a critical step in stopping the above-mentioned malicious acts. The identification of sockpuppets on a single forum-oriented social media site has seldom been addressed. This paper proposes a Single-site Multiple Accounts Identification Model (SiMAIM) framework to address this research gap. We used Mobile01, Taiwan's most popular forum-oriented social media site, to validate SiMAIM’s performance. SiMAIM achieved F1 scores between 0.6 and 0.9 on identifying sockpuppets and puppetmasters under different datasets and settings. SiMAIM also outperformed the compared methods by 6–38% in F1 score.