Related papers: The Lives of Bots
Much of our modern digital infrastructure relies critically upon open sourced software. The communities responsible for building this cyberinfrastructure require maintenance and moderation, which is often supported by volunteer efforts.…
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…
So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat…
Bots are automated social media users that can be used to amplify (mis)information and sow harmful discourse. In order to effectively influence users, bots can be generated to reproduce human user behavior. Indeed, people tend to trust…
Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect…
Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…
Information-communication technology promotes collaborative environments like Wikipedia where, however, controversiality and conflicts can appear. To describe the rise, persistence, and resolution of such conflicts we devise an extended…
Wikipedia can be considered as an extreme form of a self-managing team, as a means of labour division. One could expect that this bottom-up approach, with the absense of top-down organisational control, would lead to a chaos, but our…
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…
Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…
A Wikipedia book (known as Wikibook) is a collection of Wikipedia articles on a particular theme that is organized as a book. We propose Wikibook-Bot, a machine-learning based technique for automatically generating high quality Wikibooks…
Societies can become a conspiratorial society where there is a majority of humans that believe, and therefore spread, conspiracy theories. Artificial intelligence gave rise to social media bots that can spread conspiracies in an automated…
To address the widespread problem of uncivil behavior, many online discussion platforms employ human moderators to take action against objectionable content, such as removing it or placing sanctions on its authors. This reactive paradigm of…
On Wikipedia, sophisticated algorithmic tools are used to assess the quality of edits and take corrective actions. However, algorithms can fail to solve the problems they were designed for if they conflict with the values of communities who…
The ever-increasing complexity of modern software engineering projects makes the usage of automated assistants imperative. Bots can be used to complete repetitive tasks during development and testing, as well as promoting communication…
Wikidata is an open knowledge graph created, managed, and maintained collaboratively by a global community of volunteers. As it continues to grow, it faces substantial editor engagement challenges, including acquiring new editors to tackle…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite…
Success of planetary-scale online collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia is hinged on active and continued participation of its voluntary contributors. The phenomenal success of Wikipedia as a valued multilingual source of information is…
The importance of social media in our daily lives has unfortunately led to an increase in the spread of misinformation, political messages and malicious links. One of the most popular ways of carrying out those activities is using automated…