Consumer generated product reviews are considered as more persuasive than commercial advertising, and are now an important message source to make purchase decision. Nevertheless, firms may purposely hire spammers to create fake reviews to promote their products and to demote products of their competitors. To create the opinion majority, firms may hire a group of spammers rather than just one or few individual spammers to write fake reviewers. These spammers may act as a group to support other spammers to create a social consensus or majority of opinions. In the study, we attempt to adopt a real case to analyze the social network of spammers by K-core and Clique analysis. Our research results show that the social connection among spammers is stronger than that among non-spammers. Moreover, K-cores and cliques can be used as cues to identify spammers.
Relation:
Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016)
