Digital Stylometry: Linking Profiles Across Social Networks

There is an ever growing number of users with accounts on multiple social media and networking sites. Consequently, there is increasing interest in matching user accounts and profiles across different social networks in order to create aggregate profiles of users. In this paper, we present models fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vosoughi, Soroush, Zhou, Helen L., Roy, Deb K
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Springer-Verlag 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100806
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2564-8909
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4333-7194
Description
Summary:There is an ever growing number of users with accounts on multiple social media and networking sites. Consequently, there is increasing interest in matching user accounts and profiles across different social networks in order to create aggregate profiles of users. In this paper, we present models for Digital Stylometry, which is a method for matching users through stylometry inspired techniques. We experimented with linguistic, temporal, and combined temporal-linguistic models for matching user accounts, using standard and novel techniques. Using publicly available data, our best model, a combined temporal-linguistic one, was able to correctly match the accounts of 31% of 5,612 distinct users across Twitter and Facebook.