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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…
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…
Social bots are now deeply embedded in online platforms for promotion, persuasion, and manipulation. Most bot-detection systems still treat behavioural features as static, implicitly assuming bots behave stationarily over time. We test that…
The use of reinforcement learning to dynamically adapt and evade detection is now well-documented in several cybersecurity settings including Covert Social Influence Operations (CSIOs), in which bots try to spread disinformation. While AI…
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…
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…
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,…
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among several accounts and these automated campaigns can manipulate…
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…
The importance of effective detection is underscored by the fact that socialbots imitate human behavior to propagate misinformation, leading to an ongoing competition between socialbots and detectors. Despite the rapid advancement of…
Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. Due to the increasing popularity of Twitter, its perceived potential for exerting social influence has…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
The increased relevance of social media in our daily life has been accompanied by efforts to manipulate online conversations and opinions. Deceptive social bots -- automated or semi-automated accounts designed to impersonate humans -- have…
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,…
Social bot detection is crucial for mitigating misinformation, online manipulation, and coordinated inauthentic behavior. While existing neural network-based detectors perform well on benchmarks, they struggle with generalization due to…
Social spam produces a great amount of noise on social media services such as Twitter, which reduces the signal-to-noise ratio that both end users and data mining applications observe. Existing techniques on social spam detection have…
A growing suite of research illustrates the negative impact of social media bots in amplifying harmful information with widespread social implications. Social bot detection algorithms have been developed to help identify these bot agents…
The idea that social media platforms like Twitter are inhabited by vast numbers of social bots has become widely accepted in recent years. Social bots are assumed to be automated social media accounts operated by malicious actors with the…
The recent generative AI models' capability of creating realistic and human-like content is significantly transforming the ways in which people communicate, create and work. The machine-generated content is a double-edged sword. On one…
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…