Related papers: BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots
The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven…
Following the rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) models, language models are applied to increasingly more complex interactive tasks such as negotiations and conversation moderations. Having human evaluators directly…
Social bots-automated accounts that generate and spread content on social media-are exploiting vulnerabilities in these platforms to manipulate public perception and disseminate disinformation. This has prompted the development of public…
Anthropomorphic social bots are engineered to emulate human verbal communication and generate toxic or inflammatory content across social networking services (SNSs). Bot-disseminated misinformation could subtly yet profoundly reshape…
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…
The emergence of agentic technologies (e.g., robots) in increasingly public realms (e.g., social media) has revealed surprising antisocial tendencies in human-agent interactions. In particular, there is growing indication of people's…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex…
Contemporary social coding platforms such as GitHub facilitate collaborative distributed software development. Developers engaged in these platforms often use machine accounts (bots) for automating effort-intensive or repetitive activities.…
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
Validation of LLM-agent social simulations remains underdeveloped, with most studies relying on subjective assessments or single runs. We address this gap by running 30 independent 30-day simulations of a technology forum modeled on Voat's…
Conversation agents, commonly referred to as chatbots, are increasingly deployed in many domains to allow people to have a natural interaction while trying to solve a specific problem. Given their widespread use, it is important to provide…
Though significant efforts such as removing false claims and promoting reliable sources have been increased to combat COVID-19 "misinfodemic", it remains an unsolved societal challenge if lacking a proper understanding of susceptible online…
Bots, in recent times, have posed a major threat to enterprise networks. With the distributed nature of the way in which botnets operate, the problems faced by enterprises have become acute. A bot is a program that operates as an agent for…
Many works related to Twitter aim at characterizing its users in some way: role on the service (spammers, bots, organizations, etc.), nature of the user (socio-professional category, age, etc.), topics of interest , and others. However, for…
Given the complexity of human minds and their behavioral flexibility, it requires sophisticated data analysis to sift through a large amount of human behavioral evidence to model human minds and to predict human behavior. People currently…
Social media bot detection has always been an arms race between advancements in machine learning bot detectors and adversarial bot strategies to evade detection. In this work, we bring the arms race to the next level by investigating the…
Malicious actors exploit social media to inflate stock prices, sway elections, spread misinformation, and sow discord. To these ends, they employ tactics that include the use of inauthentic accounts and campaigns. Methods to detect these…
Social Honeypots are tools deployed in Online Social Networks (OSN) to attract malevolent activities performed by spammers and bots. To this end, their content is designed to be of maximum interest to malicious users. However, by choosing…
Twitter, a popular social network, presents great opportunities for on-line machine learning research. However, previous research has focused almost entirely on learning from passively collected data. We study the problem of learning to…