Related papers: A Large-Scale Study of Telegram Bots
Roblox is among the most popular online gaming platforms, used by hundreds of millions of users every day. A substantial portion of these users are underage, who are at a greater risk, where abusive users may utilize Roblox's real-time chat…
While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate…
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…
Since traditional social media platforms continue to ban actors spreading hate speech or other forms of abusive languages (a process known as deplatforming), these actors migrate to alternative platforms that do not moderate users content.…
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…
As ChatGPT and other Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI chatbots become increasingly integrated into individuals' daily lives, important research questions arise. What concerns and risks do these systems pose for individual users? What…
Botnet is most widespread and occurs commonly in today's cyber attacks, resulting in serious threats to our network assets and organization's properties. Botnets are collections of compromised computers (Bots) which are remotely controlled…
The past few decades have witnessed an upsurge in data, forming the foundation for data-hungry, learning-based AI technology. Conversational agents, often referred to as AI chatbots, rely heavily on such data to train large language models…
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…
While computer systems that allow users to interact through conversational natural language (i.e., chatbots) have existed for many years, varying types of applications advertising AI companionship (e.g., Character AI, Replika) have…
Providing scaffolding through educational chatbots built on Large Language Models (LLM) has potential risks and benefits that remain an open area of research. When students navigate impasses, they ask for help by formulating impasse-driven…
Telegram has grown into a significant platform for news and information sharing, favored for its anonymity and minimal moderation. This openness, however, makes it vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. In this study, we…
Mobile messaging apps are a fundamental communication infrastructure, used by billions of people every day to share information, including sensitive data. Security and Privacy are thus critical concerns for such applications. Although the…
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…
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…
Societies can become a conspiratorial society where there is a majority of humans that believe, and therefore spread, conspiracy theories. Artificial intelligence gave rise to social media bots that can spread conspiracies in an automated…
Mobile network operators implement firewalls to stop illicit messages, but scammers find ways to evade detection. Previous work has looked into SMS texts that are blocked by these firewalls. However, there is little insight into SMS texts…
Bots, software-controlled accounts that operate on social media, have been used to manipulate and deceive. We studied the characteristics and activity of bots around major political events, including elections in various countries. In this…
Unraveling the role of opinion leaders in the digital realm, this study investigates the influence of key actors on Telegram, a hybrid platform that combines messaging app features with social network dynamics, where channel administrators…
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…