Related papers: A Decade of Social Bot Detection
Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…
The rapid spread of false information and persistent manipulation attacks on online social networks (OSNs), often for political, ideological, or financial gain, has affected the openness of OSNs. While researchers from various disciplines…
Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect…
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…
Socialbots are software-driven user accounts on social platforms, acting autonomously (mimicking human behavior), with the aims to influence the opinions of other users or spread targeted misinformation for particular goals. As socialbots…
Formally announced to the public following former President Donald Trump's bans and suspensions from mainstream social networks in early 2022 after his role in the January 6 Capitol Riots, Truth Social was launched as an "alternative"…
Accurate bot detection is necessary for the safety and integrity of online platforms. It is also crucial for research on the influence of bots in elections, the spread of misinformation, and financial market manipulation. Platforms deploy…
Many Twitter users are bots. They can be used for spamming, opinion manipulation and online fraud. Recently we discovered the Star Wars botnet, consisting of more than 350,000 bots tweeting random quotations exclusively from Star Wars…
Emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), and more specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided malicious actors with powerful tools for manipulating digital discourse. LLMs have the potential to affect…
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…
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasises the role social media plays in modern-day warfare, with conflict occurring in both the physical and information environments. There is a large body of work on identifying malicious…
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…
There is evidence that Russia's Internet Research Agency attempted to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election by running fake accounts on Twitter - often referred to as "Russian trolls". In this work, we: 1) develop machine learning models…
Amid growing concerns over AI's societal risks--ranging from civilizational collapse to misinformation and systemic bias--this study explores the perceptions of AI experts and the general US registered voters on the likelihood and impact of…
Despite rapid development, current bot detection models still face challenges in dealing with incomplete data and cross-platform applications. In this paper, we propose BotBuster, a social bot detector built with the concept of a mixture of…
In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was…
Although not all bots are malicious, the vast majority of them are responsible for spreading misinformation and manipulating the public opinion about several issues, i.e., elections and many more. Therefore, the early detection of bots is…
With the prevalence of misinformation online, researchers have focused on developing various machine learning algorithms to detect fake news. However, users' perception of machine learning outcomes and related behaviors have been widely…
The rapid proliferation of AI-generated content, driven by advances in generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, and multimodal large language models, has made the creation and dissemination of synthetic media effortless,…