Deep Dive on Politician Impersonating Accounts in Social Media

There is an ever-growing number of users who duplicate the social media accounts of celebrities or generally impersonate their presence on online social media as well as Instagram. Of course, this has led to an increasing interest in detecting fake profiles and investigating their behaviour. We begin this research by targeting a few famous politicians, including Donald J. Trump, Barack Obama, and Emmanuel Macron and collecting their activity for the period of 3 months using a specifically-designed crawler across Instagram. We then experimented with several profile characteristics such as username, display name, biography, and profile picture to identify impersonator among 1,5M unique users. Using publicly crawled data, our model was able to distinguish crowds of impersonators and political bots. We continued by providing an analysis of the characteristics and behaviour of these impersonators. Finally, we conclude the analysis by classifying impersonators into four different categories.