Campaign extraction from social media

In this manuscript, we study the problem of detecting coordinated free text campaigns in large-scale social media. These campaigns—ranging from coordinated spam messages to promotional and advertising campaigns to political astro-turfing—are growing in significance and reach with the commensurate rise in massive-scale social systems. Specifically, we propose and evaluate a content-driven framework for effectively linking free text posts with common “talking points” and extracting campaigns from large-scale social media. Three of the salient features of the campaign extraction framework are: (i) first, we investigate graph mining techniques for isolating coherent campaigns from large message-based graphs; (ii) second, we conduct a comprehensive comparative study of text-based message correlation in message and user levels; and (iii) finally, we analyze temporal behaviors of various campaign types. Through an experimental study over millions of Twitter messages we identify five major types of campaigns—namely Spam, Promotion, Template, News, and Celebrity campaigns—and we show how these campaigns may be extracted with high precision and recall.