# Predicting Rogue Content and Arabic Spammers on Twitter
## 2 Motivation  
This section discusses the motivation behind our research work, with real examples of tweets with Arabic rogue and spam content and a public survey of Twitter users. Twitter has defined spamming behavior and the rules of tweet freedom [2; 10; 11]. We established our definition of a spam tweet. A tweet is considered a spam tweet if it satisfies the following conditions:  
* The tweet is advertising a fake or unreal product or service;
* The tweet contains rogue and spam verbs or words in the form of text, images, or videos [10];* The URL redirects to a malicious or phishing website [2];
* The URL redirects to a page that is not tweet-related. Figure 1 shows three examples of spam tweets that are sometimes found with unrelated hashtags. Spammers sell fake Netflix accounts, as in the first tweet: 'We sell Netflix accounts [phone number] on the occasion of opening the store. Two months for the price of one month for 20 riyals. Offer expires 24 h from now.' Furthermore, some spammers claim to sell educational certificates from accredited universities (such as bachelor's, master's, doctorate, and IELTSL degrees) without the buyer attending the institution or undergoing any tests. The middle tweet says 'Accredited university degrees for sale; Bachelor's degrees for sale in Saudi Arabia; IELTSL accredited certificates for sale; Doctorate degree for sale; Master's distance certificates for sale.' In the last example in the figure, the goal is to sell followers to social media users, along with a local phone number for interested customers: 'Selling followers on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and all social media services. Call [phone number].' Some of the data for this project were gathered by distributing a questionnaire to a small sample of a local community in Saudi Arabia. The main objective of the survey was to measure the risks to information security when using Twitter. Hence, we surveyed around 189 respondents, 91% of whom were born in Saudi Arabia. The rest of the respondents were from different countries, namely the United States (7%), Britain (2%), Iran, Belgium, and Egypt (1%). Figure 2 presents multiple pie charts, with each chart showing the percentage of each answer to one question in the survey. The participants were 85% male and 15% female. Most of the participants had a bachelor's degree (51%), followed by those with a master's degree (25%), a doctorate degree (13%), and a high school degree (11%). Most of the participants were 21-30 years old (29%), followed by 11-20 years old  
Figure 1: Three examples of spam tweets that sell Netflix accounts, educational certificates, and social media followers. (27%), 31-40 years old (25%), and 41-50 years old (19%). In response to the number of years that the participants had been using Twitter, 35% of them had been using the platform for 4-6 years, followed by 25% for 7-9 years, 20% for 1-3 years, 16% for less than 1 year, and 4% for 10-12 years. On the subject of the number of hours of Twitter use per day, 46% responded that they use it for less than an hour, 41% of them responded that they use it for 1-3 h, 11% of them responded that they use it for 4-6 h, and 2% of them responded that they use it for 7-9 h.  
Participants' opinions about security-related questions were also collected. They were asked to assess the level of Twitter security as measured by tweets that contain no viruses or fake links. Of the responses, 35% graded the security level as medium, 19% high, 17% very low and low, and 11% very high. They also assessed the level of credibility of the information posted on Twitter, with 48% reporting medium, followed by 21% low, 16% very low, 11% high, and 5% very high. They voted on the presence of immoral and inappropriate videos, with 28% very high, 23% high, 22% medium, 15% very low, and 12% low. They estimated the percentage of fraudulent accounts on Twitter, and 33% indicated very high, 22% high, 22% medium, 10% low, and 9% very low.