Related papers: Do you really follow them? Automatic detection of …
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on…
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…
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…
The world's digital information ecosystem continues to struggle with the spread of misinformation. Prior work has suggested that users who consistently disseminate a disproportionate amount of low-credibility content -- so-called…
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…
Content polluters, or bots that hijack a conversation for political or advertising purposes are a known problem for event prediction, election forecasting and when distinguishing real news from fake news in social media data. Identifying…
Many works related to Twitter aim at characterizing its users in some way: role on the service (spammers, bots, organizations, etc.), nature of the user (socio-professional category, age, etc.), topics of interest , and others. However, for…
Social network and publishing platforms, such as Twitter, support the concept of verification. Verified accounts are deemed worthy of platform-wide public interest and are separately authenticated by the platform itself. There have been…
The openness feature of Twitter allows programs to generate and control Twitter accounts automatically via the Twitter API. These accounts, which are known as bots, can automatically perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, following,…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
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…
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks attracting millions of users, while a considerable proportion of online discourse is captured. It provides a simple usage framework with short messages and an efficient application…
Although social media provides a vibrant platform to discuss real-world events, the quantity of information generated can overwhelm decision making based on that information. By better understanding who is participating in information…
Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…
Twitter has increasingly become a popular platform to share news and user opinion. A tweet is considered to be important if it receives high number of affirmative reactions from other Twitter users via Retweets. Retweet count is thus…
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…
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…
Efficient and reliable social bot classification is crucial for detecting information manipulation on social media. Despite rapid development, state-of-the-art bot detection models still face generalization and scalability challenges, which…
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…