# Social Honeypot for Humans: Luring People through Self-managed Instagram Pages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17946 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17946/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Are We All in a Truman Show? Spotting Instagram Crowdturfing through Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12904/) (2022)
- [Instagram Fake and Automated Account Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03090/) (2019)
- [Captcha Attack: Turning Captchas Against Humanity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04014/) (2022)
- [Follow Us and Become Famous! Insights and Guidelines From Instagram Engagement Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06815/) (2023)
- [Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.2097/) (2014)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social Honeypots are tools deployed in Online Social Networks (OSN) to attract malevolent activities performed by spammers and bots. To this end, their content is designed to be of maximum interest to malicious users. However, by choosing an appropriate content topic, this attractive mechanism could be extended to any OSN users, rather than only luring malicious actors. As a result, honeypots can be used to attract individuals interested in a wide range of topics, from sports and hobbies to more sensitive subjects like political views and conspiracies. With all these individuals gathered in one place, honeypot owners can conduct many analyses, from social to marketing studies. In this work, we introduce a novel concept of social honeypot for attracting OSN users interested in a generic target topic. We propose a framework based on fully-automated content generation strategies and engagement plans to mimic legit Instagram pages. To validate our framework, we created 21 self-managed social honeypots (i.e., pages) on Instagram, covering three topics, four content generation strategies, and three engaging plans. In nine weeks, our honeypots gathered a total of 753 followers, 5387 comments, and 15739 likes. These results demonstrate the validity of our approach, and through statistical analysis, we examine the characteristics of effective social honeypots.