A Survey on Statistical Twitter Spam Detection

Twitter is one of the most trendy social media staging that has 400 million monthly active users which post 700 million tweets per day. This prevalence induces the attention of spammers who use Twitter for their malicious aims such as phishing normal users or spreading malicious software and advertises through URLs shared within tweets, aggressively follow/unfollow normal users and hijack trending topics to attract their attention, depricating pornography. In August of 2014, Twitter revealed that 8.5% of its monthly active users which equals approximately 23 million users have automatically contacted their servers for regular updates. Thus, detecting and filtering spammers from normal users are mandatory in order to provide a spam-free nature in Twitter. In this paper, features of Twitter spam detection presented with discussing their effectiveness. Also, Twitter spam detection methods are categorized and discussed with their pros and cons. The old features of Twitter which are commonly used by Twitter spam detection approaches are displayed. Some new features of Twitter which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been mentioned by any other works are also presented.