Related papers: Botometer 101: Social bot practicum for computatio…

$\textit{Fake followers}$ 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…

In recent years, social bots have been using increasingly more sophisticated, challenging detection strategies. While many approaches and features have been proposed, social bots evade detection and interact much like humans making it…

Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, there have been many instances where corrupted users found ways to…

Detecting social bots has evolved into a pivotal yet intricate task, aimed at combating the dissemination of misinformation and preserving the authenticity of online interactions. While earlier graph-based approaches, which leverage…

Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…

Social media platforms have been used for information and news gathering, and they are very valuable in many applications. However, they also lead to the spreading of rumors and fake news. Many efforts have been taken to detect and debunk…

On the morning of November 9th 2016, the world woke up to the shocking outcome of the US Presidential elections: Donald Trump was the 45th President of the United States of America. An unexpected event that still has tremendous consequences…

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…

Society's reliance on social media as a primary source of news has spawned a renewed focus on the spread of misinformation. In this work, we identify the differences in how social media accounts identified as bots react to news sources of…

The year 2020 will be remembered for two events of global significance: the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In this chapter, we summarize recent studies using large public Twitter data sets on these issues. We have…

Contemporary social coding platforms such as GitHub facilitate collaborative distributed software development. Developers engaged in these platforms often use machine accounts (bots) for automating effort-intensive or repetitive activities.…

In this paper we shed light on the impact of fine-tuning over social media data in the internal representations of neural language models. We focus on bot detection in Twitter, a key task to mitigate and counteract the automatic spreading…

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…

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…

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…

Social networking services like Twitter have been playing an import role in people's daily life since it supports new ways of communicating effectively and sharing information. The advantages of these social network services enable them…

Social media platforms provide an ideal environment to spread misinformation, where social bots can accelerate the spread. This paper explores the interplay between social bots and misinformation on the Sina Weibo platform. We construct a…

Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming…

Botnets have come a long way since their inception a few decades ago. Originally toy programs written by network hobbyists, modern-day botnets can be used by cyber criminals to steal billions of dollars from users, corporations, and…

This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific papers deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the…