Related papers: How many bots are you following?

The Web contains several social media platforms for discussion, exchange of ideas, and content publishing. These platforms are used by people, but also by distributed agents known as bots. Although bots have existed for decades, with many…

Societies are complex systems which tend to polarize into sub-groups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected -- and often amplified -- in online social networks where, however, humans are no more…

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…

$\textit{Fake followers}$ are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity…

Twitter has become a vital social media platform while an ample amount of malicious Twitter bots exist and induce undesirable social effects. Successful Twitter bot detection proposals are generally supervised, which rely heavily on…

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…

The use of reinforcement learning to dynamically adapt and evade detection is now well-documented in several cybersecurity settings including Covert Social Influence Operations (CSIOs), in which bots try to spread disinformation. While AI…

The spread of misinformation poses a threat to the social media ecosystem. Effective countermeasures to mitigate this threat require that social media platforms be able to accurately detect low-credibility accounts even before the content…

The widespread of Online Social Networks and the opportunity to commercialize popular accounts have attracted a large number of automated programs, known as artificial accounts. This paper focuses on the classification of human and fake…

We consider the problem of identifying coordinated influence campaigns conducted by automated agents or bots in a social network. We study several different Twitter datasets which contain such campaigns and find that the bots exhibit…

Detecting automated accounts (bots) among genuine users on platforms like Twitter remains a challenging task due to the evolving behaviors and adaptive strategies of such accounts. While recent methods have achieved strong detection…

Social media has become a key medium of communication in today's society. This realisation has led to many parties employing artificial users (or bots) to mislead others into believing untruths or acting in a beneficial manner to such…

Research on social bot detection plays a crucial role in maintaining the order and reliability of information dissemination while increasing trust in social interactions. The current mainstream social bot detection models rely on black-box…

The emergence of Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) holds significant promise for transforming social media platforms. However, this advancement also introduces substantial security and ethical concerns, as it may facilitate malicious…

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…

With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false…

Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact…

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 the face of large-scale automated social engineering attacks to large online services, fast detection and remediation of compromised accounts are crucial to limit the spread of new attacks and to mitigate the overall damage to users,…

Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media 'bots.' Most recently, platform companies…