Related papers: Bots, elections, and social media: a brief overvie…

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…

The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation, also referred to as an Infodemic. Consequently, social media have become targets for the application of social bots, that is, algorithms that mimic human…

Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…

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…

Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…

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…

Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…

Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…

Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific…

This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their…

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…

Bots have been in the spotlight for many social media studies, for they have been observed to be participating in the manipulation of information and opinions on social media. These studies analyzed the activity and influence of bots in a…

Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen. The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on democracy is a complex issue that requires thorough research and…

Automated social media bots have existed almost as long as the social media environments they inhabit. Their emergence has triggered numerous research efforts to develop increasingly sophisticated means to detect these accounts. These…

From 2018 to 2023, Brazil experienced its most fiercely contested elections in history, resulting in the election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro followed by the left-wing, Lula da Silva. This period was marked by a murder attempt, a…

With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can…

Socialbots are intelligent software controlling all the behavior of fake accounts in an online social network. They use artificial intelligence techniques to pass themselves off as human social media users. Socialbots exploit user trust to…

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…

Bots are user accounts in social media which are controlled by computer programs. Similar to many other things, they are used for both good and evil purposes. One nefarious use-case for them is to spread misinformation or biased data in the…

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number of bots online, varying from Web crawlers for search engines, to chatbots for online customer service, spambots on social media, and content-editing bots in online collaboration…