A Survey on Pedophile Attribution Techniques for Online Platforms

Reliance on anonymity in social media has increased its popularity on these platforms among all ages. The availability of public Wi-Fi networks has facilitated a vast variety of online content, including social media applications. Although anonymity and ease of access can be a convenient means of communication for their users, it is difficult to manage and protect its vulnerable users against sexual predators. Using an automated identification system that can attribute predators to their text would make the solution more attainable. In this survey, we provide a review of the methods of pedophile attribution used in social media platforms. We examine the effect of the size of the suspect set and the length of the text on the task of attribution. Moreover, we review the most-used datasets, features, classification techniques and performance measures for attributing sexual predators. We found that few studies have proposed tools to mitigate the risk of online sexual predators, but none of them can provide suspect attribution. Finally, we list several open research problems.