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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…
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,…
Computational propaganda deploys social or political bots to try to shape, steer and manipulate online public discussions and influence decisions. Collective behaviour of populations of social bots has not been yet widely studied, though…
Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand…
During the 2016 US elections Twitter experienced unprecedented levels of propaganda and fake news through the collaboration of bots and hired persons, the ramifications of which are still being debated. This work proposes an approach to…
Twitter is one of the most popular social networks attracting millions of users, while a considerable proportion of online discourse is captured. It provides a simple usage framework with short messages and an efficient application…
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,…
The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on…
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…
In the pursuit of bolstering user safety, social media platforms deploy active moderation strategies, including content removal and user suspension. These measures target users engaged in discussions marked by hate speech or toxicity, often…
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…
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but…
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…
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…
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…
Complex networks often exhibit co-evolutionary dynamics, meaning that the network topology and the state of nodes or links are coupled, affecting each other in overlapping time scales. We focus on the co-evolutionary dynamics of online…
Misbehavior in online social networks (OSN) is an ever-growing phenomenon. The research to date tends to focus on the deployment of machine learning to identify and classify types of misbehavior such as bullying, aggression, and racism to…
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…
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…
Online Social Networks have revolutionized how we consume and share information, but they have also led to a proliferation of content not always reliable and accurate. One particular type of social accounts is known to promote unreputable…