Related papers: Better Safe Than Sorry: An Adversarial Approach to…
Recent studies in social media spam and automation provide anecdotal argumentation of the rise of a new generation of spambots, so-called social spambots. Here, for the first time, we extensively study this novel phenomenon on Twitter and…
Social bots have emerged over the last decade, initially creating a nuisance while more recently used to intimidate journalists, sway electoral events, and aggravate existing social fissures. This social threat has spawned a bot detection…
Social bots play a significant role in many online social networks (OSN) as they imitate human behavior. This fact raises difficult questions about their capabilities and potential risks. Given the recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI),…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
Once an email problem, spam has nowadays branched into new territories with disruptive effects. In particular, spam has established itself over the recent years as a ubiquitous, annoying, and sometimes threatening aspect of online social…
Socialbots are software-driven user accounts on social platforms, acting autonomously (mimicking human behavior), with the aims to influence the opinions of other users or spread targeted misinformation for particular goals. As socialbots…
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…
Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable…
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…
Nowadays, with the rise of Internet access and mobile devices around the globe, more people are using social networks for collaboration and receiving real-time information. Twitter, the microblogging that is becoming a critical source of…
Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect…
In recent years, Twitter has seen a proliferation of automated accounts or bots that send spam, offer clickbait, compromise security using malware, and attempt to skew public opinion. Previous research estimates that around 9% to 17% of…
Adversarial samples are strategically modified samples, which are crafted with the purpose of fooling a classifier at hand. An attacker introduces specially crafted adversarial samples to a deployed classifier, which are being…
The increased relevance of social media in our daily life has been accompanied by efforts to manipulate online conversations and opinions. Deceptive social bots -- automated or semi-automated accounts designed to impersonate humans -- have…
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 Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power…
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…
The high growth of Online Social Networks (OSNs) over the last few years has allowed automated accounts, known as social bots, to gain ground. As highlighted by other researchers, most of these bots have malicious purposes and tend to mimic…
An essential topic in online social network security is how to accurately detect bot accounts and relieve their harmful impacts (e.g., misinformation, rumor, and spam) on genuine users. Based on a real-world data set, we construct…
Social media platforms continue to struggle with the growing presence of social bots-automated accounts that can influence public opinion and facilitate the spread of disinformation. Over time, these social bots have advanced significantly,…