Belangrijkste concepten
Illicit promotion activities are prevalent on Twitter, with over 12 million distinct posts identified across 580,530 Twitter accounts. These posts span diverse categories of illicit goods and services, including pornography, gambling, illegal drugs, money laundering, and data theft, and are distributed in multiple natural languages.
Samenvatting
The study presents an extensive analysis of illicit promotion activities on Twitter and other online social networks (OSNs). Key findings include:
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Scale of Illicit Promotion:
- 12,401,082 distinct posts of illicit promotion (PIPs) have been identified on Twitter.
- These PIPs originate from 580,530 distinct Twitter accounts.
- The ratio of PIPs to the overall Twitter stream ranges from 2.69% to 4.75% across different time periods.
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Diversity of Illicit Goods and Services:
- PIPs are distributed across 10 major categories, with the top categories being pornography (69.78%), gambling (13.34%), and illegal drugs (8.04%).
- Within each category, a diverse set of specific illicit products and services are promoted, such as child pornography, methamphetamine, weapon sales, and fake documents.
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Cross-Platform Distribution:
- Illicit promotion is not limited to Twitter, but is also observed on other popular OSNs like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.
- Some PIPs are found to be distributed across multiple OSN platforms, suggesting coordinated campaigns.
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Evasion Tactics:
- Miscreants employ various techniques to evade content moderation, such as using jargon words, multilingual compositions, and masquerading PIPs as benign content.
- Despite Twitter's continuous content moderation efforts, over 90% of PIPs can survive for at least two months before being taken down.
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Communication Channels:
- PIP operators prefer to use instant messaging platforms, especially end-to-end encrypted ones like Telegram and WeChat, for further communication with potential victims.
- 37,621 distinct instant messaging accounts have been extracted from the PIPs, indicating the large scale of the underlying promotion campaigns.
The findings highlight the concerning prevalence of illicit promotion on OSNs and the need for collaborative efforts across platforms to mitigate this issue.
Statistieken
Over 12 million distinct posts of illicit promotion (PIPs) have been observed on Twitter.
580,530 distinct Twitter accounts have been found to publish PIPs.
The ratio of PIPs to the overall Twitter stream ranges from 2.69% to 4.75% across different time periods.
Citaten
"Illicit promotion on online social networks (OSNs) is traditionally considered as either infeasible or uncommon, since OSNs typically enforce strict content moderation against accounts and posts. However, it is not the case anymore."
"Particularly, 12 million distinct posts of illicit promotion (PIPs) have been observed on the Twitter platform, which are widely distributed in 5 major natural languages and 10 categories of illicit goods and services, e.g., drugs, data leakage, gambling, and weapon sales."
"Various evasion techniques have been adopted by PIP operators, e.g., the use of various jargon words, composing PIPs with multilingual characters, and masquerading the tweet text as benign but injecting illicit promotion elements into usernames, media files, or even poll options."