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Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that much of the content shared in microblogging platforms is created and publicized by bots…
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…
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…
Research on social bot detection plays a crucial role in maintaining the order and reliability of information dissemination while increasing trust in social interactions. The current mainstream social bot detection models rely on black-box…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
During sudden onset crisis events, the presence of spam, rumors and fake content on Twitter reduces the value of information contained on its messages (or "tweets"). A possible solution to this problem is to use machine learning to…
Twitter, as one of the most popular social networks, provides a platform for communication and online discourse. Unfortunately, it has also become a target for bots and fake accounts, resulting in the spread of false information and…
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…
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…
State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the…
Social medias are increasing their influence with the vast public information leading to their active use for marketing by the companies and organizations. Such marketing promotions are difficult to identify unlike the traditional medias…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
Social bots represent a new generation of bots that make use of online social networks (OSNs) as a command and control (C\&C) channel. Malicious social bots were responsible for launching large-scale spam campaigns, promoting low-cap…
Twitter is used for a variety of reasons, including information dissemination, marketing, political organizing and to spread propaganda, spamming, promotion, conversations, and so on. Characterizing these activities and categorizing…
Social Media Platforms (SMPs) like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. have large user base all around the world that generates huge amount of data every second. This includes a lot of posts by fake and spam users, typically used by many…
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…
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere,…
With the rise in popularity of public social media and micro-blogging services, most notably Twitter, the people have found a venue to hear and be heard by their peers without an intermediary. As a consequence, and aided by the public…
While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate…