Social networks have gained popularity in the recent years due to its instantaneous sharing and communication features with friends and family networks. It also offers exclusive features for individuals, organizations, and companies which have been the primary cause for this ultimate rise in the number of user access social networks. As people moved from offline to online communication and email to social networks, the spammers have instigated exploiting the online social network platform. There are various Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc., and spammers are hidden in all of these sites in the guise of legitimate users. Differentiating spammers from legitimate users is a critical issue and cannot be programmed as the spammers keep evolving and changing their strategies to not to expose their identity. Not identifying them at an early stage may lead to hazardous consequences. This paper presents a literature survey of methods and techniques of spam identification in online social networks proposed by various researchers in the history. It further summarizes various feature sets suggested in the literature from different perspectives.
Volume 11 | 04-Special Issue
Pages: 1256-1262