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Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…

Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…

Online social networks (OSN) like Twitter or Facebook are popular and powerful since they allow reaching millions of users online. They are also a popular target for socialbot attacks. Without a deep understanding of the impact of such…

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…

Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails…

Twitter bot detection has become a crucial task in efforts to combat online misinformation, mitigate election interference, and curb malicious propaganda. However, advanced Twitter bots often attempt to mimic the characteristics of genuine…

A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing…

In the contemporary world, a significant number of people use social networking services for a variety of purposes, including, but not limited to, communicating, exchanging messages and searching for information. A popular social network in…

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)…

In micro-blogging platforms, people can connect with others and have conversations on a wide variety of topics. However, because of homophily and selective exposure, users tend to connect with like-minded people and only read agreeable…

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…

We have retrieved and analyzed several millions of Twitter messages corresponding to the Spanish General elections held on the 20th of December 2015 and repeated on the 26th of June 2016. The availability of data from two electoral…

This is an approach to detecting a subset of bots on Twitter, that at best is under-researched. This approach will be generic enough to be adaptable to most, if not all social networks. The subset of bots this focuses on are those that can…

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…

The arm race between spambots and spambot-detectors is made of several cycles (or generations): a new wave of spambots is created (and new spam is spread), new spambot filters are derived and old spambots mutate (or evolve) to new species.…

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…

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…

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…

The ability to detect coordinated activity in communication networks is an ongoing challenge. Prior approaches emphasize considering any activity exceeding a specific threshold of similarity to be coordinated. However, identifying such a…

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…