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Related papers: The Rise of Social Bots

200 papers

In recent years, social bots have been using increasingly more sophisticated, challenging detection strategies. While many approaches and features have been proposed, social bots evade detection and interact much like humans making it…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2018-12-20 Isa Inuwa-Dutse , Bello Shehu Bello , Ioannis Korkontzelos

Research on social bots aims at advancing knowledge and providing solutions to one of the most debated forms of online manipulation. Yet, social bot research is plagued by widespread biases, hyped results, and misconceptions that set the…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Stefano Cresci , Kai-Cheng Yang , Angelo Spognardi , Roberto Di Pietro , Filippo Menczer , Marinella Petrocchi

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…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Zhaoxuan Tan , Shangbin Feng , Melanie Sclar , Herun Wan , Minnan Luo , Yejin Choi , Yulia Tsvetkov

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)…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Alessandro Balestrucci , Rocco De Nicola , Marinella Petrocchi , Catia Trubiani

Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2017-05-17 Zafar Gilani , Reza Farahbakhsh , Gareth Tyson , Liang Wang , Jon Crowcroft

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…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Norah Abokhodair , Daisy Yoo , David W. McDonald

Socialbots are intelligent software controlling all the behavior of fake accounts in an online social network. They use artificial intelligence techniques to pass themselves off as human social media users. Socialbots exploit user trust to…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Samaneh Hosseini Moghaddam , Mandana Khademi , Maghsoud Abbaspour

From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions,…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Milena Tsvetkova , Taha Yasseri , Niccolo Pescetelli , Tobias Werner

Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps.…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Florian Brachten , Milad Mirbabaie , Stefan Stieglitz , Olivia Berger , Sarah Bludau , Kristina Schrickel

Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. Due to the increasing popularity of Twitter, its perceived potential for exerting social influence has…

Social bots represent a new generation of bots that make use of online social networks (OSNs) as a command and control (C\&C) channel. Malicious social bots were responsible for launching large-scale spam campaigns, promoting low-cap…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-05-09 Majd Latah

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…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Alessandro Balestrucci

Bot Detection is an essential asset in a period where Online Social Networks(OSN) is a part of our lives. This task becomes more relevant in crises, as the Covid-19 pandemic, where there is an incipient risk of proliferation of social bots,…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Marzia Antenore , Jose M. Camacho-Rodriguez , Emanuele Panizzi

Social media platforms face an ongoing challenge in combating the proliferation of social bots, automated accounts that are also known to distort public opinion and support the spread of disinformation. Over the years, social bots have…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Edoardo Allegrini , Edoardo Di Paolo , Marinella Petrocchi , Angelo Spognardi

Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-09-10 James M. Berzuk , Lauren Corcoran , Brannen McKenzie-Lefurgey , Katie Szilagyi , James E. Young

Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Javier Pastor-Galindo , Félix Gómez Mármol , Gregorio Martínez Pérez

Socialbots, or non-human/algorithmic social media users, have recently been documented as competing for information dissemination and disruption on online social networks. Here we investigate the influence of socialbots in Mexican Twitter…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2022-02-15 E. Velázquez , M. Yazdani , P. Suárez-Serrato

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Milena Tsvetkova , Ruth García-Gavilanes , Luciano Floridi , Taha Yasseri

As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2017-10-23 Florian Brachten , Stefan Stieglitz , Lennart Hofeditz , Katharina Kloppenborg , Annette Reimann

With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Ashiqur Rahman , Ehsan Mohammadi , Hamed Alhoori