Fake Twitter followers detection by Denoising Autoencoder

Gaining followers on the Twitter platform has become a rapid way to increase one's credibility on this social network, that in the last few years has become a launch pad for new trends and to influence people opinions. So, many people have begun to buy fake followers on underground markets appositely created to sold them. Therefore, identifying fake followers profiles is useful to maintain the balance between real influential people on the network and people who simply exploited this mechanism. This work presents a model based on artificial neural networks able to detect fake Twitter profiles. In particular, a denoising autoencoder has been implemented as anomaly detector trained with a semi-supervised learning approach. The model has been tested on a benchmark already used in literature and results are presented.