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Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…

Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable…

As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts.…

This is an approach to detecting a subset of bots on Twitter, that at best is under-researched. This approach will be generic enough to be adaptable to most, if not all social networks. The subset of bots this focuses on are those that can…

Twitter bot detection is vital in combating misinformation and safeguarding the integrity of social media discourse. While malicious bots are becoming more and more sophisticated and personalized, standard bot detection approaches are still…

We present the first in-depth and large-scale study of misleading repurposing, in which a malicious user changes the identity of their social media account via, among other things, changes to the profile attributes in order to use the…

Socialbots are software-driven user accounts on social platforms, acting autonomously (mimicking human behavior), with the aims to influence the opinions of other users or spread targeted misinformation for particular goals. As socialbots…

Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…

Research into influence campaigns on Twitter has mostly relied on identifying malicious activities from tweets obtained via public APIs. These APIs provide access to public tweets that have not been deleted. However, bad actors can delete…

The issue of quantifying and characterizing various forms of social media manipulation and abuse has been at the forefront of the computational social science research community for over a decade. In this paper, I provide a…

Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…

Recent advances in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have blurred the lines between authentic and machine-generated content, making it almost impossible for humans to distinguish between such media. One notable…

Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…

Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…

Social Media are evolving as a pervasive source of news able to reach a larger audience through their spreading power. The main drawback is given by the presence of malicious accounts, known as social bots, which are often used to diffuse…

Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities.…

While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate…

The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…

Efficient and reliable social bot classification is crucial for detecting information manipulation on social media. Despite rapid development, state-of-the-art bot detection models still face generalization and scalability challenges, which…

Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…