Characterizing Network Motifs to Identify Spam Comments

Personal blogs are one of the most interconnected and socially networked type of social media. The capability of placing "comments'' on blog posts makes the blogosphere rather a complex environment.In this paper, we study the behavior of bloggers who place comments on others' posts and examine if it is possible to detect spam comments.We look at the functionality of different network motif profiles in the comment network, and identify certain subgraphs that associate with spam comments. We illustrate that some of these patterns and their statistical features could be exploited to classify comments and bloggers to spammers and non-spammers. Our preliminary results are encouraging and show reasonable results on rich and dense blog networks.