Fake Profile Detection on Social Networking Websites: A Comprehensive Review

This article aims to summarize the recent advancement in the fake account detection methodology on social networking websites. Over the past decade, social networking websites have received huge attention from users all around the world. As a result, popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others saw an unexpected rise in registered users. However, researchers claim that all registered accounts are not real; many of them are fake and created for specific purposes. The primary purpose of fake accounts is to spread spam content, rumor, and other unauthentic messages on the platform. Hence, it is needed to filter out the fake accounts, but it has many challenges. In the past few years, researchers applied many advanced technologies to identify fake accounts. In the survey presented in this article, we summarize the recent development of fake account detection technologies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of the existing models in brief. The survey may help future researchers to identify the gaps in the current literature and develop a generalized framework for fake profile detection on social networking websites.