Related papers: Detecting Influence Campaigns in Social Networks U…

Botnets in online social networks are increasingly often affecting the regular flow of discussion, attacking regular users and their posts, spamming them with irrelevant or offensive content, and even manipulating the popularity of messages…

Social media platforms have become a hub for political activities and discussions, democratizing participation in these endeavors. However, they have also become an incubator for manipulation campaigns, like information operations (IOs).…

It has been widely recognized that automated bots may have a significant impact on the outcomes of national events. It is important to raise public awareness about the threat of bots on social media during these important events, such as…

Botnets could autonomously infect, propagate, communicate and coordinate with other members in the botnet, enabling cybercriminals to exploit the cumulative computing and bandwidth of its bots to facilitate cybercrime. Traditional detection…

Influence maximization is the task of selecting a small number of seed nodes in a social network to maximize the influence spread from these seeds. It has been widely investigated in the past two decades. In the canonical setting, the…

The argument for persistent social media influence campaigns, often funded by malicious entities, is gaining traction. These entities utilize instrumented profiles to disseminate divisive content and disinformation, shaping public…

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…

Language generation models' democratization benefits many domains, from answering health-related questions to enhancing education by providing AI-driven tutoring services. However, language generation models' democratization also makes it…

Identifying the most influential nodes in information networks has been the focus of many research studies. This problem has crucial applications in various contexts, such as controlling the propagation of viruses or rumours in real-world…

How would admissions look like in a university program for influencers? In the realm of social network analysis, influence maximization and link prediction stand out as pivotal challenges. Influence maximization focuses on identifying a set…

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…

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)…

Bots have been playing a crucial role in online platform ecosystems, as efficient and automatic tools to generate content and diffuse information to the social media human population. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of social bots…

Data extracted from social media platforms, such as Twitter, are both large in scale and complex in nature, since they contain both unstructured text, as well as structured data, such as time stamps and interactions between users. A key…

Social networks play a fundamental role in propagation of information and news. Characterizing the content of the messages becomes vital for different tasks, like breaking news detection, personalized message recommendation, fake users…

Partner selection is crucial for cooperation and hinges on communication. As artificial agents, especially those powered by large language models (LLMs), become more autonomous, intelligent, and persuasive, they compete with humans for…

Large Language Model-driven (LLM-driven) social bots pose a growing threat to online discourse by generating human-like content that evades conventional detection. Existing methods suffer from limited detection accuracy due to overreliance…

Social media platforms face an ongoing challenge in combating the proliferation of social bots, automated accounts that are also known to distort public opinion and support the spread of disinformation. Over the years, social bots have…

Campaigners, advertisers and activists are increasingly turning to social recommendation mechanisms, provided by social media, for promoting their products, services, brands and even ideas. However, many times, such social network based…

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…