Related papers: Do you really follow them? Automatic detection of …
Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…
Online Social Networks (OSN) are increasingly being used as platform for an effective communication, to engage with other users, and to create a social worth via number of likes, followers and shares. Such metrics and crowd-sourced ratings…
Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…
Chatter on social media is 20% bots and 80% humans. Chatter by bots and humans is consistently different: bots tend to use linguistic cues that can be easily automated while humans use cues that require dialogue understanding. Bots use…
Social media include diverse interaction metrics related to user popularity, the most evident example being the number of user followers. The latter has raised concerns about the credibility of the posts by the most popular creators.…
A very large number of people use Online Social Networks daily. Such platforms thus become attractive targets for agents that seek to gain access to the attention of large audiences, and influence perceptions or opinions. Botnets,…
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 media are key platforms for the public to discuss political issues. As a result, researchers have used data from these platforms to analyze public opinions and forecast election results. Recent studies reveal the existence of…
Twitter is a web application playing dual roles of online social networking and micro-blogging. The popularity and open structure of Twitter have attracted a large number of automated programs, known as bots. Legitimate bots generate a…
In recent years, social bots have been using increasingly more sophisticated, challenging detection strategies. While many approaches and features have been proposed, social bots evade detection and interact much like humans making it…
Compromising legitimate accounts is a way of disseminating malicious content to a large user base in Online Social Networks (OSNs). Since the accounts cause lots of damages to the user and consequently to other users on OSNs, early…
Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing…
This paper presents a method to validate the true patrons of a brand, group, artist or any other entity on the social networking site Twitter. We analyze the trend of total number of tweets, average retweets and total number of followers…
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…
Social media posts may go viral and reach large numbers of people within a short period of time. Such posts may threaten the public dialogue if they contain misleading content, making their early detection highly crucial. Previous works…
Influential users have great potential for accelerating information dissemination and acquisition on Twitter. How to measure the influence of Twitter users has attracted significant academic and industrial attention. Existing influential…
Social bots have become widely known by users of social platforms. To prevent social bots from spreading harmful speech, many novel bot detections are proposed. However, with the evolution of social bots, detection methods struggle to give…
Botnets in online social networks are increasingly often affecting the regular flow of discussion, attacking regular users and their posts, spamming them with irrelevant or offensive content, and even manipulating the popularity of messages…
Russian Internet Trolls use fake personas to spread disinformation through multiple social media streams. Given the increased frequency of this threat across social media platforms, understanding those operations is paramount in combating…
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere,…