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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…
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…
We investigate how users perceive social media account verification, how those perceptions compare to platform practices, and what happens when a gap emerges. We use recent changes in Twitter's verification process as a natural experiment,…
Bots have been playing a crucial role in online platform ecosystems, as efficient and automatic tools to generate content and diffuse information to the social media human population. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of social bots…
Social bots have become widely known by users of social platforms. To prevent social bots from spreading harmful speech, many novel bot detections are proposed. However, with the evolution of social bots, detection methods struggle to give…
This study presents a review of research on social media bot detection. Social media bots are used by political and criminal actors for mass distribution of political messages, as well as rumors, conspiracy theories, and other forms of…
In an era where social media platforms are central to political communication, the activity of bots raises pressing concerns about amplification, manipulation, and misinformation. Drawing on more than 315 million tweets posted from August…
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…
Online abuse is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in modern-day society, with 41 percent of Americans having experienced online harassment in some capacity in 2021. People who identify as women, in particular, can be subjected to a…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generating realistic text across diverse subjects. Concerns have been raised that they could be utilized to produce fake content with a deceptive intention, although evidence…
Toxicity is endemic to online social networks including Twitter. It follows a Pareto like distribution where most of the toxicity is generated by a very small number of profiles and as such, analyzing and characterizing these toxic profiles…
An infodemic is an emerging phenomenon caused by an overabundance of information online. This proliferation of information makes it difficult for the public to distinguish trustworthy news and credible information from untrustworthy sites…
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…
As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…
A bot is a piece of software that is usually installed on an infected machine without the user's knowledge. A bot is controlled remotely by the attacker under a Command and Control structure. Recent statistics show that bots represent one…
Automated software agents --- or bots --- have long been an important part of how Wikipedia's volunteer community of editors write, edit, update, monitor, and moderate content. In this paper, I discuss the complex social and technical…
A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing…
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…
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…
People use microblogging platforms like Twitter to involve with other users for a wide range of interests and practices. Twitter profiles run by different types of users such as humans, bots, spammers, businesses and professionals. This…