Related papers: BotNet Detection on Social Media
Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…
Bots are automated social media users that can be used to amplify (mis)information and sow harmful discourse. In order to effectively influence users, bots can be generated to reproduce human user behavior. Indeed, people tend to trust…
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…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
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…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
Research on social bots aims at advancing knowledge and providing solutions to one of the most debated forms of online manipulation. Yet, social bot research is plagued by widespread biases, hyped results, and misconceptions that set the…
Social bots play a significant role in many online social networks (OSN) as they imitate human behavior. This fact raises difficult questions about their capabilities and potential risks. Given the recent advances in Generative AI (GenAI),…
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…
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…
Bot Detection is an essential asset in a period where Online Social Networks(OSN) is a part of our lives. This task becomes more relevant in crises, as the Covid-19 pandemic, where there is an incipient risk of proliferation of social bots,…
Online social networks (OSN) like Twitter or Facebook are popular and powerful since they allow reaching millions of users online. They are also a popular target for socialbot attacks. Without a deep understanding of the impact of such…
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…
Content polluters, or bots that hijack a conversation for political or advertising purposes are a known problem for event prediction, election forecasting and when distinguishing real news from fake news in social media data. Identifying…
Efficient and reliable social bot classification is crucial for detecting information manipulation on social media. Despite rapid development, state-of-the-art bot detection models still face generalization and scalability challenges, which…
While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate…
Bots, software-controlled accounts that operate on social media, have been used to manipulate and deceive. We studied the characteristics and activity of bots around major political events, including elections in various countries. In this…
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…
Twitter bot detection is vital in combating misinformation and safeguarding the integrity of social media discourse. While malicious bots are becoming more and more sophisticated and personalized, standard bot detection approaches are still…
Social bots represent a new generation of bots that make use of online social networks (OSNs) as a command and control (C\&C) channel. Malicious social bots were responsible for launching large-scale spam campaigns, promoting low-cap…