Related papers: The Rise of Social Bots
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.…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
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…
The characterization and detection of bots with their presumed ability to manipulate society on social media platforms have been subject to many research endeavors over the last decade. In the absence of ground truth data (i.e., accounts…
While social media are a key source of data for computational social science, their ease of manipulation by malicious actors threatens the integrity of online information exchanges and their analysis. In this Chapter, we focus on malicious…
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
Social bots play a significant role in many online social networks (OSN) as they imitate human behavior. This fact raises difficult questions about their capabilities and potential risks. Given the recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI),…
Social media platforms can expose influential trends in many aspects of everyday life. However, the movements they represent can be contaminated by disinformation. Social bots are one of the significant sources of disinformation in social…
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied online platforms to detect, estimate, and characterize bot…
Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
Chatter on social media is 20% bots and 80% humans. Chatter by bots and humans is consistently different: bots tend to use linguistic cues that can be easily automated while humans use cues that require dialogue understanding. Bots use…
The increased relevance of social media in our daily life has been accompanied by efforts to manipulate online conversations and opinions. Deceptive social bots -- automated or semi-automated accounts designed to impersonate humans -- have…
This paper gives an overview of impersonation bots that generate output in one, or possibly, multiple modalities. We also discuss rapidly advancing areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence that could lead to frighteningly…
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…
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…
Social bots have become an important component of online social media. Deceptive bots, in particular, can manipulate online discussions of important issues ranging from elections to public health, threatening the constructive exchange of…