User awareness and defenses against sockpuppet friend invitations in Facebook
Conference
Talukder, S, Hernandez, N, Azimpourkivi, M et al. (2022). User awareness and defenses against sockpuppet friend invitations in Facebook
. 1740-1747. 10.1145/3477314.3507012
Talukder, S, Hernandez, N, Azimpourkivi, M et al. (2022). User awareness and defenses against sockpuppet friend invitations in Facebook
. 1740-1747. 10.1145/3477314.3507012
Friend relations in Facebook have been used to access private and sensitive user data, post false or abusive information on the timelines and news feeds of victims, and scam and influence the perceptions of victims. In a qualitative study with 35 participants who use Facebook we found that they often confirm invitations received from sockpuppet accounts. Some participants claimed prior exposure to such invitations and exhibited increased awareness. However, in our study several such participants have also confirmed at least one sockpuppet invitation. To take steps toward addressing this problem, in this paper we introduce a new interface to inform, educate and nudge users to inspect their Facebook friend invitations before making a decision, and avoid confirming invitations received from suspicious accounts. We propose a classifier to detect undesirable friend invitations and use it to prioritize a must-see pending friend list. In studies with 145 participants, we found that when compared to a control, Facebook-like interface, our solution reduced confirmed friend invitations from sockpuppet accounts by 42.6 percentage points, reduced blind confirmations of such accounts by 22.6 percentage points, and increased the inspected profiles of such accounts by 54.67 percentage points. We show that when trained on only a few user decisions from these studies, our classifier predicted the user decisions for pending friends with an F1-measure of 96.52%.
