Perceiving The Fake Profiles & Botnets Using GNNs

Read full text
Authors: Akkala Shivani Reddy, Janardhan Sreedharan, Veldi Karunakar, Erukali Shiva Kumar, Kommu Sony
Cited by: 0

Abstract

India\\\'s 600+ million social media users face unprecedented threats from sophisticated fake profiles and coordinated botnets that undermine platform integrity, spread disinformation, and influence elections. Traditional machine learning approaches relying on isolated account features fail to capture complex relational patterns and coordinated behaviors characteristic of modern botnets. This research proposes a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework that models social networks as G=(V,E) graphs, where nodes represent user profiles with rich behavioral features and weighted edges capture interaction patterns. The architecture combines Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) for neighborhood aggregation with Graph Attention Networks (GAT) for dynamic relationship weighting, enabling hierarchical feature learning across three GNN layers. Trained on combined TwiBot-22, Cresci-2015, and India-specific datasets, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance: 96.3% accuracy, 95.7% precision, 96.8% recall, and 96.2% F1-score, outperforming SVM (82.1%), Random Forest (85.3%), and other baselines by 11-18%. Key innovations include multi-scale graph embeddings capturing both individual account anomalies and bot cluster topologies, temporal interaction modeling, and real-time deployment as a scalable web application (

Fields of Study & Subjects

Spam and Phishing Detection Misinformation and Its Impacts Complex Network Analysis Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN