Related papers: Social Bots: Detection and Challenges
Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…
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…
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…
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…
While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political…
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…
Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect…
The emergence of Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) holds significant promise for transforming social media platforms. However, this advancement also introduces substantial security and ethical concerns, as it may facilitate malicious…
Although social bots can be engineered for constructive applications, their potential for misuse in manipulative schemes and malware distribution cannot be overlooked. This dichotomy underscores the critical need to detect social bots on…
This paper presents a study on the growing threat of "sleeper social bots," AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their…
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,…
The rapid spread of false information and persistent manipulation attacks on online social networks (OSNs), often for political, ideological, or financial gain, has affected the openness of OSNs. While researchers from various disciplines…
Detecting Twitter Bots is crucial for maintaining the integrity of online discourse, safeguarding democratic processes, and preventing the spread of malicious propaganda. However, advanced Twitter Bots today often employ sophisticated…
Online social media, such as Twitter and Instagram, democratized information broadcast, allowing anyone to share information about themselves and their surroundings at an unprecedented scale. The large volume of information thus posted on…
Socialbots are intelligent software controlling all the behavior of fake accounts in an online social network. They use artificial intelligence techniques to pass themselves off as human social media users. Socialbots exploit user trust to…
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…
Adversarial Internet robots (botnets) represent a growing threat to the safe use and stability of the Internet. Botnets can play a role in launching adversary reconnaissance (scanning and phishing), influence operations (upvoting), and…
Data extracted from social networks like Twitter are increasingly being used to build applications and services that mine and summarize public reactions to events, such as traffic monitoring platforms, identification of epidemic outbreaks,…
In the past, online social networks (OSN) like Facebook and Twitter became powerful instruments for communication and networking. Unfortunately, they have also become a welcome target for socialbot attacks. Therefore, a deep understanding…
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…