“VKontakte” Fake Accounts and their Influence on the Users’ Social Network

Abstract

The paper deals with the fake accounts in online social networks and resulting data misrepresentation about the structure of network users’ interactions. Fakes create an additional noise in the data; therefore investigation of the network as a social space becomes difficult. The intervention of fakes leaves a mark on both the network structure and on its properties. The estimation of the number and influence of fakes is also important for sampling large networks, since the analysis of complete networks is often impossible because of their size.