Stealthy and Seductive: A Survey on Online Illicit Promotion

Abstract

With the growth of netizens and the popularity of the Internet and smart devices, illicit promotional practitioners have been trending to promote online instead of offline. However, social media platform companies, operators, and government have their detection systems and censorship to solve such promotion. While they use newer techniques to deal with them, the illicit promotional practitioners also use newer techniques to evade the detection system and censorship; the process is like an adversarial process. In this paper, we look at this phenomenon and analyze how practitioners use techniques to do illicit promotion online and how to mitigate this phenomenon.