Detection of Fake Accounts on Social Media Using Multimodal Data With Deep Learning

In recent years, the proliferation of fake accounts on social media has become a significant concern for individuals, organizations, and society. Fake accounts play an important role in spreading fake news, rumors, spam, unethical harassment, and other mischievous motives on social media platforms. Detecting such accounts manually is time-consuming and challenging, especially with the increasing sophistication of the methods used to create them. Therefore, there is a need for automated approaches to detect these fake accounts. This article aims to reveal fake accounts and their role on social media platforms. This article has explored various methodologies to detect fake accounts from social platforms, which will help prevent cybercrime. We have also proposed a generalized deep learning (DL) model to detect such accounts on social media using multimodal data. The proposed architecture uses a combination of textual, visual, and network-based features to capture the various characteristics of fake accounts. Specifically, we use a deep neural network that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for visual data, long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for textual data, and convolutional graph networks (GCNs) for network-based data. We evaluated our model on a publicly available dataset of Twitter accounts and achieved state-of-the-art performance in detecting fake accounts, with an F1 score of 0.96. We also conducted experiments to show the effectiveness of each feature and the combination of the three features.