Related papers: The DARPA Twitter Bot Challenge
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…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
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…
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…
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…
Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
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…
The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power…
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)…
We consider the problem of identifying coordinated influence campaigns conducted by automated agents or bots in a social network. We study several different Twitter datasets which contain such campaigns and find that the bots exhibit…
This study presents a review of research on social media bot detection. Social media bots are used by political and criminal actors for mass distribution of political messages, as well as rumors, conspiracy theories, and other forms of…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
For many, social networks have become the primary source of news, although the correctness of the provided information and its trustworthiness are often unclear. The investigations of the 2016 US presidential elections have brought the…
On the morning of November 9th 2016, the world woke up to the shocking outcome of the US Presidential elections: Donald Trump was the 45th President of the United States of America. An unexpected event that still has tremendous consequences…