Related papers: Arming the public with artificial intelligence to …
Chatbots, the common moniker for collaborative assistants, are Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that enables people to naturally interact with them to get tasks done. Although chatbots have been studied since the dawn of AI, they have…
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…
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 has become a major social media platform since its launching in 2006, while complaints about bot accounts have increased recently. Although extensive research efforts have been made, the state-of-the-art bot detection methods fall…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
A growing suite of research illustrates the negative impact of social media bots in amplifying harmful information with widespread social implications. Social bot detection algorithms have been developed to help identify these bot agents…
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…
Political polling is a multi-billion dollar industry with outsized influence on the societal trajectory of the United States and nations around the world. However, it has been challenged by factors that stress its cost, availability, and…
In today's digital era, the Internet, especially social media platforms, plays a significant role in shaping public opinions, attitudes, and beliefs. Unfortunately, the credibility of scientific information sources is often undermined by…
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)…
From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions,…
Social Media are evolving as a pervasive source of news able to reach a larger audience through their spreading power. The main drawback is given by the presence of malicious accounts, known as social bots, which are often used to diffuse…
The year 2020 will be remembered for two events of global significance: the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In this chapter, we summarize recent studies using large public Twitter data sets on these issues. We have…
Despite rapid development, current bot detection models still face challenges in dealing with incomplete data and cross-platform applications. In this paper, we propose BotBuster, a social bot detector built with the concept of a mixture of…
Participation on social media platforms has many benefits but also poses substantial threats. Users often face an unintended loss of privacy, are bombarded with mis-/disinformation, or are trapped in filter bubbles due to over-personalized…
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…
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…
Automated accounts on social media have become increasingly problematic. We propose a key feature in combination with existing methods to improve machine learning algorithms for bot detection. We successfully improve classification…
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…