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Chatter on social media is 20% bots and 80% humans. Chatter by bots and humans is consistently different: bots tend to use linguistic cues that can be easily automated while humans use cues that require dialogue understanding. Bots use…
Online social networks (OSNs) are increasingly threatened by social bots which are software-controlled OSN accounts that mimic human users with malicious intentions. A social botnet refers to a group of social bots under the control of a…
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…
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied online platforms to detect, estimate, and characterize bot…
With the explosive growth of online social media, the ancient problem of information disorders interfering with news diffusion has surfaced with a renewed intensity threatening our democracies, public health, and news outlets' credibility.…
As a response to the trends of the increasing importance of computational approaches and the accelerating pace in science, I propose in this position paper to establish the concept of "science bots" that autonomously perform programmed…
Social bots have emerged over the last decade, initially creating a nuisance while more recently used to intimidate journalists, sway electoral events, and aggravate existing social fissures. This social threat has spawned a bot detection…
Misinformation spread through social media has become a fundamental challenge in modern society. Recent studies have evaluated various strategies for addressing this problem, such as by modifying social media platforms or educating people…
Twitter bots are a controversial element of the platform, and their negative impact is well known. In the field of scientific communication, they have been perceived in a more positive light, and the accounts that serve as feeds alerting…
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…
Large-scale databases of human activity in social media have captured scientific and policy attention, producing a flood of research and discussion. This paper considers methodological and conceptual challenges for this emergent field, with…
Publicly deploying research chatbots is a nuanced topic involving necessary risk-benefit analyses. While there have recently been frequent discussions on whether it is responsible to deploy such models, there has been far less focus on the…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more sophisticated, there is a possibility to harness LLMs to power social media bots. This work investigates the realism of generating LLM-Powered social media bot networks. Through a combination of…
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…
Communication plays a major role in social systems. Effective communications, which requires transmission of the messages between individuals without disruptions or noise, can be a powerful tool to deliver intended impact. Language and…
For more than a decade now, academicians and online platform administrators have been studying solutions to the problem of bot detection. Bots are computer algorithms whose use is far from being benign: malicious bots are purposely created…
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…
From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions,…
Online social networks are often subject to influence campaigns by malicious actors through the use of automated accounts known as bots. We consider the problem of detecting bots in online social networks and assessing their impact on the…
In recent years the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly prevalent in a growing number of fields. As AI systems are being adopted in more high-stakes areas such as medicine and finance, ensuring that they are…