Related papers: The Rise of Social Bots
The importance of social media in our daily lives has unfortunately led to an increase in the spread of misinformation, political messages and malicious links. One of the most popular ways of carrying out those activities is using automated…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
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…
Social bots remain a major vector for spreading disinformation on social media and a menace to the public. Despite the progress made in developing multiple sophisticated social bot detection algorithms and tools, bot detection remains a…
The presence and complexity of political Twitter bots has increased in recent years, making it a very difficult task to recognize these accounts from real, human users. We intended to provide an answer to the following question: are…
A very large number of people use Online Social Networks daily. Such platforms thus become attractive targets for agents that seek to gain access to the attention of large audiences, and influence perceptions or opinions. Botnets,…
Bots are automated social media users that can be used to amplify (mis)information and sow harmful discourse. In order to effectively influence users, bots can be generated to reproduce human user behavior. Indeed, people tend to trust…
Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media 'bots.' Most recently, platform companies…
Online social networks (OSN) like Twitter or Facebook are popular and powerful since they allow reaching millions of users online. They are also a popular target for socialbot attacks. Without a deep understanding of the impact of such…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more sophisticated, there is a possibility to harness LLMs to power social media bots. This work investigates the realism of generating LLM-Powered social media bot networks. Through a combination of…
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…
Social bots have emerged over the last decade, initially creating a nuisance while more recently used to intimidate journalists, sway electoral events, and aggravate existing social fissures. This social threat has spawned a bot detection…
A series of bots performing simulated social engineering attacks using phishing in the Twitter platform was developed to identify potentially unsafe user behavior. In this work different bot versions were developed to collect feedback data…
A growing suite of research illustrates the negative impact of social media bots in amplifying harmful information with widespread social implications. Social bot detection algorithms have been developed to help identify these bot agents…
Bots have been playing a crucial role in online platform ecosystems, as efficient and automatic tools to generate content and diffuse information to the social media human population. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of social bots…
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…
Bots are user accounts in social media which are controlled by computer programs. Similar to many other things, they are used for both good and evil purposes. One nefarious use-case for them is to spread misinformation or biased data in the…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
Automated social agents, or bots, are increasingly becoming a problem on social media platforms. There is a growing body of literature and multiple tools to aid in the detection of such agents on online social networking platforms. We…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…