Related papers: How many bots are you following?
The arm race between spambots and spambot-detectors is made of several cycles (or generations): a new wave of spambots is created (and new spam is spread), new spambot filters are derived and old spambots mutate (or evolve) to new species.…
The discourse around conspiracy theories is currently thriving amidst the rampant misinformation in online environments. Research in this field has been focused on detecting conspiracy theories on social media, often relying on limited…
Twitter bots are a controversial element of the platform, and their negative impact is well known. In the field of scientific communication, they have been perceived in a more positive light, and the accounts that serve as feeds alerting…
The problem of detecting bots, automated social media accounts governed by software but disguising as human users, has strong implications. For example, bots have been used to sway political elections by distorting online discourse, to…
In recent years, the proliferation of disinformation has become an issue against the backdrop of the spread of social media. In this study, we focus on socialbots, one of the causes of this problem, and analyze several domestic cases to…
In the human-bot symbiotic information ecosystem, social bots play key roles in spreading and correcting disinformation. Understanding their influence is essential for risk control and better governance. However, current studies often rely…
``Impression Zombies'', a type of malicious account designed to artificially inflate engagement metrics, have recently emerged as a significant threat on X (formerly Twitter). These accounts disseminate a high volume of low-quality,…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
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…
Pathogenic Social Media (PSM) accounts such as terrorist supporter accounts and fake news writers have the capability of spreading disinformation to viral proportions. Early detection of PSM accounts is crucial as they are likely to be key…
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…
Impersonators are playing an important role in the production and propagation of the content on Online Social Networks, notably on Instagram. These entities are nefarious fake accounts that intend to disguise a legitimate account by making…
Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been…
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and influence of…
Bot as it is popularly called is an inherent attributes of botnet tool. Botnet is a group of malicious tools acting as an entity. Furthermore, history has it that the aim of what gave rise to botnet was the idea to simplify the method of…
Fake news in social media has quickly become one of the most discussed topics in today's society. With false information proliferating and causing a significant impact in the political, economical, and social domains, research efforts to…
How predictable is success in complex social systems? In spite of a recent profusion of prediction studies that exploit online social and information network data, this question remains unanswered, in part because it has not been adequately…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
Social bot detection is crucial for mitigating misinformation, online manipulation, and coordinated inauthentic behavior. While existing neural network-based detectors perform well on benchmarks, they struggle with generalization due to…