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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…
Social media has become a key medium of communication in today's society. This realisation has led to many parties employing artificial users (or bots) to mislead others into believing untruths or acting in a beneficial manner to such…
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 media platforms continue to struggle with the growing presence of social bots-automated accounts that can influence public opinion and facilitate the spread of disinformation. Over time, these social bots have advanced significantly,…
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…
Social media users often hold several accounts in their effort to multiply the spread of their thoughts, ideas, and viewpoints. In the particular case of objectionable content, users tend to create multiple accounts to bypass the combating…
Online social network analysis has attracted great attention with a vast number of users sharing information and availability of APIs that help to crawl online social network data. In this paper, we study the research studies that are…
Language generation models' democratization benefits many domains, from answering health-related questions to enhancing education by providing AI-driven tutoring services. However, language generation models' democratization also makes it…
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…
Automated social agents, or bots, are increasingly becoming a problem on social media platforms. There is a growing body of literature and multiple tools to aid in the detection of such agents on online social networking platforms. We…
Twitter is a web application playing dual roles of online social networking and micro-blogging. The popularity and open structure of Twitter have attracted a large number of automated programs, known as bots. Legitimate bots generate a…
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)…
Social media accounts engaging in online manipulation can change their behaviors for re-purposing or to evade detection. Existing detection systems are built on features that do not exploit such behavioral patterns. Here we investigate the…
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…
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…
Recent advances in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have blurred the lines between authentic and machine-generated content, making it almost impossible for humans to distinguish between such media. One notable…
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…
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…
Recent research brought awareness of the issue of bots on social media and the significant risks of mass manipulation of public opinion in the context of political discussion. In this work, we leverage Twitter to study the discourse during…
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…