FAKE SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS AND THEIR DETECTION

Abstract

The increasing use of social media has led to a rise in fake accounts used for spam, misinformation, fraud, and malicious activities. Detecting these accounts is essential for improving the security and reliability of online platforms. This project proposes a machine learning-based approach to identify fake social media accounts by analyzing user profile information and behavioral features such as posting activity, follower-to-following ratio, and account characteristics. The data is preprocessed, relevant features are extracted, and a classification model is trained to distinguish genuine accounts from fake ones. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can accurately detect fake accounts, helping to reduce online abuse and enhance user trust in social media platforms. KEYWORDS: Fake Profile Detection, Social Bot Detection, Bot Detection, Spam Account Detection, Fake User Identification, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI).