Related papers: Social Media Bot Policies: Evaluating Passive and …

Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…

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…

Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps.…

Efficient and reliable social bot classification is crucial for detecting information manipulation on social media. Despite rapid development, state-of-the-art bot detection models still face generalization and scalability challenges, which…

Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…

Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we…

There has been a rise in online platforms facilitating the buying and selling of social media accounts. While the trade of social media profiles is not inherently illegal, social media platforms view such transactions as violations of their…

As social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly popular, a growing number of malicious attacks, such as phishing and malware, are exploiting them. Among these attacks, social botnets have sophisticated…

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…

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…

So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat…

The prevalence of harmful content on social media platforms poses significant risks to users and society, necessitating more effective and scalable content moderation strategies. Current approaches rely on human moderators, supervised…

Social media platforms can expose influential trends in many aspects of everyday life. However, the movements they represent can be contaminated by disinformation. Social bots are one of the significant sources of disinformation in social…

Participation on social media platforms has many benefits but also poses substantial threats. Users often face an unintended loss of privacy, are bombarded with mis-/disinformation, or are trapped in filter bubbles due to over-personalized…

Social bots have become widely known by users of social platforms. To prevent social bots from spreading harmful speech, many novel bot detections are proposed. However, with the evolution of social bots, detection methods struggle to give…

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 massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…

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)…

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…

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,…