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Research on social bots aims at advancing knowledge and providing solutions to one of the most debated forms of online manipulation. Yet, social bot research is plagued by widespread biases, hyped results, and misconceptions that set the…
Detecting Twitter Bots is crucial for maintaining the integrity of online discourse, safeguarding democratic processes, and preventing the spread of malicious propaganda. However, advanced Twitter Bots today often employ sophisticated…
In the past, online social networks (OSN) like Facebook and Twitter became powerful instruments for communication and networking. Unfortunately, they have also become a welcome target for socialbot attacks. Therefore, a deep understanding…
It is known that many Twitter users are bots, which are accounts controlled and sometimes created by computers. Twitter bots can send spam tweets, manipulate public opinion and be used for online fraud. Here we report the discovery,…
The rapid and accurate identification of bot accounts in online social networks is an ongoing challenge. In this paper, we propose BOTTRINET, a unified embedding framework that leverages the textual content posted by accounts to detect…
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…
In recent years, bullying and aggression against users on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences to victims of all demographics. In particular, cyberbullying affects more than half of young social media users…
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cornerstone in modern society, serving as platforms for diverse content consumption by millions of users each day. However, the challenge of ensuring the accuracy of information shared on these platforms…
The problem of detecting bots, automated social media accounts governed by software but disguising as human users, has strong implications. For example, bots have been used to sway political elections by distorting online discourse, to…
Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerous attacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless, crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they are continuously…
While existing social bot detectors perform well on benchmarks, their robustness across diverse real-world scenarios remains limited due to unclear ground truth and varied misleading cues. In particular, the impact of shortcut learning,…
Hate speech detection on Twitter is critical for applications like controversial event extraction, building AI chatterbots, content recommendation, and sentiment analysis. We define this task as being able to classify a tweet as racist,…
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.…
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…
This paper addresses the important problem of discerning hateful content in social media. We propose a detection scheme that is an ensemble of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) classifiers, and it incorporates various features associated with…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…
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…
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…
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among several accounts and these automated campaigns can manipulate…
Botnet detection based on machine learning have witnessed significant leaps in recent years, with the availability of large and reliable datasets that are extracted from real-life scenarios. Consequently, adversarial attacks on machine…