Identifying Unknown and Identical Users in Cross-Application Social Media Networks

Abstract: The internet was born in later 1980�s, as the use of internet was increasing tremendously the evolution of social media networks (SMN�s) began. The SMN proves to be the best platform for information retrieval. However, identifying unknown and identical users on multiple social media application is still an unsolved problem. People use different social media for different purpose; the idea of integrating multiple social media application can take the research a step forward. The main idea of this paper is to identify alias and identical accounts by merging multiple SMN in order to get complete information about a particular user. In this paper, we develop a methodology Friend Relationship-Based User Identification (FRUI) algorithm for mapping individuals on cross application SMN�s. The friend cycle of every individual differs therefore, accuracy of our result will be maintained if we use friend list as a key component to analyze cross application social media networks. We also focus on using two more methods to improve efficiency of our algorithm. Our study has shown that FRUI is effective to analyze and de-anonymize social media.

Keywords: Cross-Application, Social Media Network, Anonymous Identical users, Friend Relationship based User Identification.