Leveraging node neighborhoods and egograph topology for better bot detection in social graphs

Due to their popularity, online social networks are a popular target for spam, scams, malware distribution and more recently state-actor propaganda. In this paper, we review a number of recent approaches to fake account and bot classification. Based on this review and our experiments, we propose our own method which leverages the social graph's topology and differences in egographs of legitimate and fake user accounts to improve identification of the latter. We evaluate our approach against other common approaches on a real-world dataset of users of the social network Twitter.