Honors Theses

Date of Award

Spring 4-29-2020

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Computer and Information Science

First Advisor

Philip Rhodes

Second Advisor

Dawn Wilkins

Third Advisor

Yixin Chen

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to study and analyze the detection of sockpuppet accounts on Reddit. Sockpuppet accounts are created exclusively to cause mischief or mayhem at a site without the original user being identified. With the rise of sockpuppet accounts, it is very important to identify these accounts and help maintain a healthy online community. The data used for the research was obtained from Reddit which is stored in the dirt cluster. The categorization of sockpuppet accounts and non-sockpuppet accounts was implemented with TF-IDF (term frequency inverse document frequency algorithm), k-Means clustering algorithm and a multilayer perceptron classifier. The goal is to identify sockpuppet accounts from a huge dataset of accounts on Reddit and bring awareness of the level of harm and misuse sockpuppet accounts can create to the online community.

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