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Escalating proliferation of inorganic accounts, commonly known as bots, within the digital ecosystem represents an ongoing and multifaceted challenge to online security, trustworthiness, and user experience. These bots, often employed for…

While social media are a key source of data for computational social science, their ease of manipulation by malicious actors threatens the integrity of online information exchanges and their analysis. In this Chapter, we focus on malicious…

Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing…

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,…

As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts.…

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…

Botnets in online social networks are increasingly often affecting the regular flow of discussion, attacking regular users and their posts, spamming them with irrelevant or offensive content, and even manipulating the popularity of messages…

The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power…

The characterization and detection of bots with their presumed ability to manipulate society on social media platforms have been subject to many research endeavors over the last decade. In the absence of ground truth data (i.e., accounts…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Social networks have triumphed in communicating people online, but they have also been exploited to launch influence operations for manipulating society. The deployment of software-controlled accounts (e.g., social bots) has proven to be…

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…

Twitter bot detection has become an increasingly important task to combat misinformation, facilitate social media moderation, and preserve the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art bot detection methods generally leverage the…

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…

Social Media are evolving as a pervasive source of news able to reach a larger audience through their spreading power. The main drawback is given by the presence of malicious accounts, known as social bots, which are often used to diffuse…

Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users)…