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FAMOUS Profile Detective

Learn to spot bots and impersonators

Interactive game

Human or Impersonator

Compare two profiles, pick the human, and learn a new signal in every level.

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Level focus

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Game complete

You cleared every level. Keep practicing or replay to improve.

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Learn

Signals that reveal impersonators

Treat this page like a field guide. Each section highlights a distinct signal that helps you tell real people from automated or impersonated accounts.

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Quick checklist

Pause before you react. Look for consistency, rhythm, and real conversation.

About

Profile Detective

This prototype supports is a mini-game for FAMOUS research theme on how people recognize online manipulation, impersonation and bot behaviour online.

Section 01

Project mission

The project explores how people experience and respond to fabricated online personas.

Section 02

Why this matters

Online manipulation often looks subtle. By practicing how to inspect profiles, learn different strategies manipulated by bots/impersonations, players build intuition to spot fake account and build habits that reduce the chance of sharing or trusting misleading accounts.

Section 03

References

The project is part of the mini-game under FAMOUS theme. More information could be found here.

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  • AI generated images for the prototype were produced with ChatGPT.
  • Real profile photos are drawn from the FFHQ dataset .
  • Inspired by Which Face is Real .
  • K. Zarei, R. Farahbakhsh, N. Crespi and G. Tyson, "Impersonation on Social Media: A Deep Neural Approach to Identify Ingenuine Content," 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), The Hague, Netherlands, 2020, pp. 11-15, doi: 10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381437. keywords: {Fans;Social networking (online);Multimedia Web sites; Neural networks;Production;Media;Character recognition; Impersonators;Fake Profile;Fake Content;Fake Engagement;Bot; Instagram;Social Media}