Related papers: Collective behaviour of social bots is encoded in …
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…
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,…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact…
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…
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…
Large-scale manipulations on social media have two important characteristics: (i) use of propaganda to influence others, and (ii) adoption of coordinated behavior to spread it and to amplify its impact. Despite the connection between them,…
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…
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…
Social media platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in social bot activity, significantly affecting online discourse. Our study explores the dynamic nature of bot engagement related to Extinction Rebellion climate change protests…
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…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
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…
Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…
Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…
Online Social Networks represent a novel opportunity for political campaigns, revolutionising the paradigm of political communication. Nevertheless, many studies uncovered the presence of d/misinformation campaigns or of malicious…
While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political…
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…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
Social bots are now deeply embedded in online platforms for promotion, persuasion, and manipulation. Most bot-detection systems still treat behavioural features as static, implicitly assuming bots behave stationarily over time. We test that…