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

Social media have been deliberately used for malicious purposes, including political manipulation and disinformation. Most research focuses on high-resource languages. However, malicious actors share content across countries and languages,…

Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…

The rapid and accurate identification of bot accounts in online social networks is an ongoing challenge. In this paper, we propose BOTTRINET, a unified embedding framework that leverages the textual content posted by accounts to detect…

Social media has emerged as a cornerstone of social movements, wielding significant influence in driving societal change. Simulating the response of the public and forecasting the potential impact has become increasingly important. However,…

Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…

Understanding user behaviors on social media has garnered significant scholarly attention, enhancing our comprehension of how virtual platforms impact society and empowering decision-makers. Simulating social media behaviors provides a…

Intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities and gained increasing popularity on social media platforms. While LLM agents are reshaping the ecology of social media, there…

Large Language Model-driven (LLM-driven) social bots pose a growing threat to online discourse by generating human-like content that evades conventional detection. Existing methods suffer from limited detection accuracy due to overreliance…

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…

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…

With its features of remix, TikTok is the designated platform for meme-making and dissemination. Creative combinations of video, emoji, and filters allow for an endless stream of memes and trends animated by sound. The platform has focused…

The rapid proliferation of AI-generated content, driven by advances in generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, and multimodal large language models, has made the creation and dissemination of synthetic media effortless,…

The detection of online influence operations -- coordinated campaigns by malicious actors to spread narratives -- has traditionally depended on content analysis or network features. These approaches are increasingly brittle as generative…

Automated content filtering and moderation is an important tool that allows online platforms to build striving user communities that facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Unfortunately, resourceful actors try to bypass automated filters…

Social media in present times has a significant and growing influence. Fake news being spread on these platforms have a disruptive and damaging impact on our lives. Furthermore, as multimedia content improves the visibility of posts more…

Antisocial behavior (ASB) on social media -- including hate speech, harassment, and cyberbullying -- poses growing risks to platform safety and societal well-being. Prior research has focused largely on networks such as X and Reddit, while…

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…

Within OSNs, many of our supposedly online friends may instead be fake accounts called social bots, part of large groups that purposely re-share targeted content. Here, we study retweeting behaviors on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of…

The serious privacy and security problems related to online social networks (OSNs) are what fueled two complementary studies as part of this thesis. In the first study, we developed a general algorithm for the mining of data of targeted…

Microblogs are increasingly exploited for predicting prices and traded volumes of stocks in financial markets. However, it has been demonstrated that much of the content shared in microblogging platforms is created and publicized by bots…