Related papers: A Decade of Social Bot Detection
So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
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…
Twitter has become a major social media platform since its launching in 2006, while complaints about bot accounts have increased recently. Although extensive research efforts have been made, the state-of-the-art bot detection methods fall…
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 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…
Automated social agents, or bots, are increasingly becoming a problem on social media platforms. There is a growing body of literature and multiple tools to aid in the detection of such agents on online social networking platforms. We…
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,…
Alarmed by the volume of disinformation that was assumed to have taken place during the 2016 US elections, scholars, politics and journalists predicted the worst when the first deepfakes began to emerge in 2018. After all, US Elections 2020…
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…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
This is an approach to detecting a subset of bots on Twitter, that at best is under-researched. This approach will be generic enough to be adaptable to most, if not all social networks. The subset of bots this focuses on are those that can…
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.…
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…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…
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…
This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data. In particular, we focus on more than 1.5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…
Donald Trump was lagging behind in nearly all opinion polls leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, but he surprisingly won the election. This raises the following important questions: 1) why most opinion polls were not accurate in…
State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the…