Detecting Suspicious Social Astroturfing Groups in Tourism Social Networks

In the contemporary era, people are increasingly depending on online reviews before making shopping decisions. However in tourism and hospitality social networks, some astroturfing campaigns are made by organizations to promote their product or service. Astroturfing reviews can cause many issues to tourists who make decisions based on online reviews available. In this paper we proposed Latent Group Detective Model based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model for efficient discovery of suspicious social astroturfing groups in tourism domain, and then a case study is presented to show the potentials of the proposed method.