A Forensic Text Analytics Framework for Fake Social Media Profile Detection

Fake social media profiles increasingly resemble ordinary accounts, combining believable images, fluent biographies, copied posts, and selective engagement, which makes single signal detection unreliable. This study develops and evaluates a forensic natural language processing (NLP) framework that treats profile text as digital evidence rather than raw model input. Profiles were collected from Facebook, Instagram, X, Truth Social, and LinkedIn through network expansion and vocabulary guided scraping, then anonymized, merged, cleaned, and organized into structured text and profile records. Ground truth came from human eye annotation (referred to throughout as human eye review, human review, or manual review) supported by three LLM reviewers (referred to throughout as LLM assisted review), OpenAI GPT-4o, Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini 1.5 Pro, with strict agreement logic producing confidence-tiered labels across platform-specific label spaces covering scam, fraud, harmful, and legitimate behavior. Each model received a defined set of label categories, was instructed to return a single label with a one sentence rationale, and worked independently with no cross-model communication. Multidimensional features, including TF-IDF representations, sentence embeddings, scam lexicon counts, sentiment and emotion scores, and behavioral indicators, were extracted through a pipeline built to keep links, hashtags, contact markers, and repeated phrasing as forensic signals rather than noise. Traditional classifiers, transformer models, and ensembles were trained on verified labels, and the best model per platform was applied to the full dataset of over 309,108 records under confidence filtered classification, with predictions below a 0.70 probability threshold flagged for human review. The framework links classification outputs to textual indicators through explainable AI, achieving weighted F1 scores between 0.86 and 0.96 across five platforms. These results show that profile text alone provides strong, production-relevant evidence for detecting fake and harmful accounts, even though the framework treats this as one evidence stream to be weighed alongside image and behavioral signals rather than as a final determination on its own. The accompanying evidence trail means an investigator or a trust and safety team can see why a profile was flagged rather than being handed a bare score, which is what turns a classifier into a tool that can be checked, challenged, and used directly in an investigation.