A reliable and evolutive web application to detect social capitalists

On Twitter, social capitalists use dedicated hashtags and mutual subscriptions to each other in order to gain followers and to be retweeted. Their methods are successful enough to make them appear as influent users. Indeed, applications dedicated to the influence measurement such as Klout and Kred give high scores to most of these users. Meanwhile, their high number of retweets and followers are not due to the relevance of the content they tweet, but to their social capitalism techniques. In order to be able to detect these users, we train a classifier using a dataset of social capitalists and regular users. We then implement this classifier in a web application that we call DDP. DDP allows users to test whether a Twitter account is a social capitalist or not and to visualize the data we use to make the prediction. DDP allows administrator to crawl data from a lot of users automatically. Furthermore, administrators can manually label Twitter accounts as social capitalists or regular users to add them into the dataset. Finally, administrators can train new classifiers in order to take into account the new Twitter accounts added to the dataset, and thus making evolve the classifier with these new recently collected data. The web application is thus a way to collect data, make evolve the knowledge about social capitalists and to keep detecting them efficiently.