Related papers: The DARPA Twitter Bot Challenge
Participation on social media platforms has many benefits but also poses substantial threats. Users often face an unintended loss of privacy, are bombarded with mis-/disinformation, or are trapped in filter bubbles due to over-personalized…
During Australia's unprecedented bushfires in 2019-2020, misinformation blaming arson resurfaced on Twitter using #ArsonEmergency. The extent to which bots were responsible for disseminating and amplifying this misinformation has received…
Society's reliance on social media as a primary source of news has spawned a renewed focus on the spread of misinformation. In this work, we identify the differences in how social media accounts identified as bots react to news sources of…
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…
Twitter bots amplify target content in a coordinated manner to make them appear popular, which is an astroturfing attack. Such attacks promote certain keywords to push them to Twitter trends to make them visible to a broader audience. Past…
The weaponization of digital communications and social media to conduct disinformation campaigns at immense scale, speed, and reach presents new challenges to identify and counter hostile influence operations (IOs). This paper presents an…
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…
Foreign information operations conducted by Russian and Chinese actors exploit the United States' permissive information environment. These campaigns threaten democratic institutions and the broader Westphalian model. Yet, existing…
Social media bots are AI agents that participate in online conversations. Most studies focus on the general bot and the malicious nature of these agents. However, bots have many different personas, each specialized towards a specific…
Conspiracy theories can threaten society by spreading misinformation, deepening polarization, and eroding trust in democratic institutions. Social media often fuels the spread of conspiracies, primarily driven by two key actors:…
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is…
Much debate has been around the misapplication of metrics in research assessment. As a result of this concern, the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was launched, an initiative that caused opposing viewpoints. However, the…
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets,…
Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading.…
Online social networks are often subject to influence campaigns by malicious actors through the use of automated accounts known as bots. We consider the problem of detecting bots in online social networks and assessing their impact on the…
Fake news are affecting a large proportion of the population even becoming a danger to the society. Mostly, this disinformation flow take place through Internet. Being aware of that problem, in this work we propose a synthetic indicator…
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…
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 TruthBot, an all-in-one multilingual conversational chatbot designed for seeking truth (trustworthy and verified information) on specific topics. It helps users to obtain information specific to certain topics, fact-check…
This work examines the influence of misinformation and the role of AI agents, called bots, on social network platforms. To quantify the impact of misinformation, it proposes two new metrics based on attributes of tweet engagement and user…