TrueTop: A Sybil-Resilient System for User Influence Measurement on Twitter

Influential users have great potential for accelerating information dissemination and acquisition on Twitter. How to measure the influence of Twitter users has attracted significant academic and industrial attention. Existing influential measurement techniques, however, are vulnerable to sybil users that are thriving on Twitter. Although sybil defenses for online social networks have been extensively investigated, they commonly assume unique mappings from human-established trust relationships to online social associations and thus do not apply to Twitter where users can freely follow each other. This paper presents TrueTop, the first sybil-resilient system to measure the influence of Twitter users. TrueTop is firmly rooted in two observations from real Twitter datasets. First, although non-sybil users may incautiously follow strangers, they tend to be more careful and selective in retweeting, replying to, and mentioning other Twitter users. Second, influential users usually get much more retweets, replies, and mentions than non-influential users. Detailed theoretical studies and synthetic simulations show that TrueTop can generate very accurate influence measurement results and also have strong resilience to sybil attacks.