Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging from platform mechanisms versus user interactions. We find no strong or consistent evidence of political bias in the news feed. Despite this, the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are exposed depend strongly on the political leaning of their early connections. The interactions of conservative accounts are skewed toward the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content shifting their experience toward the political center. Partisan accounts, especially conservative ones, tend to receive more followers and follow more automated accounts. Conservative accounts also find themselves in denser communities and are exposed to more low-credibility content.
Social and political bots have a small but strategic role in Venezuelan political conversations. These automated scripts generate content through social media platforms and then interact with people. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots in Venezuela, we analyze the tweeting, following and retweeting patterns for the accounts of prominent Venezuelan politicians and prominent Venezuelan bots. We find that bots generate a very small proportion of all the traffic about political life in Venezuela. Bots are used to retweet content from Venezuelan politicians but the effect is subt…
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 elections and manipulate constituents. In the paper at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots on Twitter in the context of the November 2019 Spanish general election. Throughout our study, we classified involved users as social bots or humans, and examined their interactions from a quantitative (i.e., amount of traffic generated and existing…
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots during the UK referendum on EU membership, we analyze the tweeting patterns for both human users and bots. We find that political bots have a small but strategic role …
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 the 2018 US midterm elections and analyze social bot activity and interactions with humans. We collected 2.6 million tweets for 42 days around the election day from nearly 1 million users. We use the collected tweets to answer three research questions: (i) Do social bots lean and behave according to a political ideology? (ii) Can we observe different strateg…
Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on a specific topic, namely the migration flux from Northern Africa to Italy. We measure the significant traffic of tweets only, by implementing an entropy-based null model that discounts the activity of users and the virality of tweets. Results show that social bots…
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 chapter, we summarize our findings of bot operations in the context of the 2016 and 2018 US Presidential and Midterm elections and the 2017 French Presidential election.
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 one of the main actors associated with manipulation campaigns, especially in the political context. Uncovering the strategies behind bots' activities is of paramount importance to detect and curb such campaigns. In this paper, we present a long term (one year) analysis of bots activity on Twitter in the run-up to the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections. We identify …
The presence and complexity of political Twitter bots has increased in recent years, making it a very difficult task to recognize these accounts from real, human users. We intended to provide an answer to the following question: are temporal patterns of activity qualitatively different in fake and human accounts? We collected a large sample of tweets during the post-electoral conflict in the US in 2020 and performed supervised and non-supervised statistical learning technique sto quantify the predictive power of time-series features for human-bot recognition. Our results show that there are no…
An infodemic is an emerging phenomenon caused by an overabundance of information online. This proliferation of information makes it difficult for the public to distinguish trustworthy news and credible information from untrustworthy sites and non-credible sources. The perils of an infodemic debuted with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and bots (i.e., automated accounts controlled by a set of algorithms) that are suspected of spreading the infodemic. Although previous research has revealed that bots played a central role in spreading misinformation during major political events, how bots …
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 unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the result…
The year 2020 will be remembered for two events of global significance: the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. In this chapter, we summarize recent studies using large public Twitter data sets on these issues. We have three primary objectives. First, we delineate epistemological and practical considerations when combining the traditions of computational research and social science research. A sensible balance should be struck when the stakes are high between advancing social theory and concrete, timely reporting of ongoing events. We additionally comment on the computationa…
Bots have been playing a crucial role in online platform ecosystems, as efficient and automatic tools to generate content and diffuse information to the social media human population. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of social bots in content spreading dynamics in social media. In particular, we will first investigate some differences between diffusion dynamics of content generated by bots, as opposed to humans, in the context of political communication, then study the characteristics of bots behind the diffusion dynamics of social media spam campaigns.
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 profiling bots had been focused largely on malicious bots, with the assumption that these bots should be removed. In this work, however, we find many bots that are benign, and propose a new, broader categorization of bots based on their behaviors. This includes broadcast, consumption, and spam bots. To facilitate comprehensive analyses of bots and how they compar…
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 stocks, manipulating user's digital influence and conducting political astroturf. This paper presents a detailed review on current social bots and proper techniques that can be used to fly under the radar of OSNs defences to be undetectable for long periods of time. We also suggest a refined taxonomy of detection approaches from social network perspective, as well…
Taibah University（泰巴大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Taif University（塔伊夫大学）
Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization remains largely understudied. In this work, we contribute new insights into the role of bots in spreading religious hatred on Arabic Twitter and introduce a novel regression model that can accurately identify Arabic language bots. Our assessment shows that existing tools that are highly accurate in detecting English bots don't perform as well on Arabic bots. …
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S. Congress' investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, with Russia accused of using trolls (malicious accounts created to manipulate) and bots to spread misinformation and politically biased information. In this study, we explore the effects of this manipulatio…
The Web contains several social media platforms for discussion, exchange of ideas, and content publishing. These platforms are used by people, but also by distributed agents known as bots. Although bots have existed for decades, with many of them being benevolent, their influence in propagating and generating deceptive information in the last years has increased. Here we present a characterization of the discussion on Twitter about the 2020 Chilean constitutional referendum. The characterization uses a profile-oriented analysis that enables the isolation of anomalous content using machine lear…
With people moving out of physical public spaces due to containment measures to tackle the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, online platforms become even more prominent tools to understand social discussion. Studying social media can be informative to assess how we are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis. However, social media platforms are also populated by bots, automated accounts that can amplify certain topics of discussion at the expense of others. In this paper, we study 43.3M English tweets about COVID-19 and provide early evidence of the use of bots to promot…
2018 started with massive protests in Iran, bringing back the impressions of the so called "Arab Spring" and it's revolutionary impact for the Maghreb states, Syria and Egypt. Many reports and scientific examinations considered online social networks (OSN's) such as Twitter or Facebook to play a critical role in the opinion making of people behind those protests. Beside that, there is also evidence for directed manipulation of opinion with the help of social bots and fake accounts. So, it is obvious to ask, if there is an attempt to manipulate the opinion-making process related to the Iranian …
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. However, there are indications that not only humans, but also social bots are active on these platforms during crisis situations. Although identifying the impact of social bots during extreme events seems to be a highly relevant topic, research remains sparse. To fill this research gap, we started a bigger project in analysing the influence of social bots durin…
Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the contributors they share. Using connections between outlets, we demonstrate how contributors' publishing trajectories tend to align with outlet political leanings. We also show how polarized clustering of outlets translates to differences in the topics of news covered and the style and tone of articles published. In addition, we demonstrate how contributors who cross…
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 understanding of collective patterns arising from interactions between bots would aid social bot detection. Here we show that there are significant differences in collective behaviour between population of bots and population of humans as detected from their Twitter activity. Using a large dataset of tweets we have collected during the UK EU referendum campaig…
The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven functionality of man-machine collaboration. Reviewing the debates post the debacle, we reflect upon the policy consequences of the use of Social Botnets and understand the impact of their adversarial operation in terms of catalysing institutional decay, growing infrastructural anxieties, increased industry regulations, more vulnerable Individuals and more distorte…
We study how political polarization is reflected in the social media posts used by media outlets to promote their content online. In particular, we track the Twitter posts of several media outlets over the course of more than three years (566K tweets), and the engagement with these tweets from other users (104M retweets), modeling the relationship between the tweet text and the political diversity of the audience. We build a tool that integrates our model and helps journalists craft tweets that are engaging to a politically diverse audience, guided by the model predictions. To test the real-wo…
Social media provides many opportunities to monitor and evaluate political phenomena such as referendums and elections. In this study, we propose a set of approaches to analyze long-running political events on social media with a real-world experiment: the debate about Brexit, i.e., the process through which the United Kingdom activated the option of leaving the European Union. We address the following research questions: Could Twitter-based stance classification be used to demonstrate public stance with respect to political events? What is the most efficient and comprehensive approach to meas…
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 study, we characterize retweet bots that have been uncovered by purchasing retweets from the black market. We detect whether they are fake or genuine accounts involved in inauthentic activities and what they do in order to appear legitimate. We also analyze their differences from human-controlled accounts. From our findings on the nature and life-cycle of re…
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations, i.e., ``reaching the bubbles''. This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada. We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election…
The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the predictors of offline political activism, at both population and individual level. We show that it is possible to classify the stance of users on the gun issue, especially accurately when network information is available. Alongside socioeconomic variables, network information such as the relative size of the two sides of the debate is also predictive of state-…
There is an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is like a public sphere or an echo chamber. Among many forms of social media, Twitter is one of the most crucial online places for political debate. Most of the previous studies focus on the formal structure of the Twitter political field, such as its homophilic tendency, or otherwise limit the analysis to a few topics. In order to explore whether Twitter functions as an echo chamber in general, however, we have to investigate not only the structure but also the contents of Twitter's political field. Accordingly, we conducted both large-sca…
The omnipresent COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a parallel spreading of misinformation, also referred to as an Infodemic. Consequently, social media have become targets for the application of social bots, that is, algorithms that mimic human behaviour. Their ability to exert influence on social media can be exploited by amplifying misinformation, rumours, or conspiracy theories which might be harmful to society and the mastery of the pandemic. By applying social bot detection and content analysis techniques, this study aims to determine the extent to which social bots interfere with COVID- 19 d…
The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limited attention and technology constrain the expressive power of humans, while incentives abound to develop software agents mimicking humans. These social bots interact, often unnoticed, with real people in social media ecosystems, but their abundance is uncertain. While many bots are benign, one can design harmful bots with the goals of persuading, smearing, or deceiving. Here we discuss the characteristics of modern, …
As our reliance on social media platforms and web services increase day by day, exploiters view these platforms as an opportunity to manipulate our thoughts ad actions. These platforms have become an open playground for social bot accounts. Social bots not only learn human conversations, manners, and presence but also manipulate public opinion, act as scammers, manipulate stock markets, and so on. There has been evidence of bots manipulating people's opinions and thoughts which can be a great threat to democracy. Identification and prevention of such campaigns that release or create these bots…
This paper presents a user modeling pipeline to analyze discussions and opinions shared on social media regarding polarized political events (e.g., public polls). The pipeline follows a four-step methodology. First, social media posts and users metadata are crawled. Second, a filtering mechanism is applied to filter spammers and bot users. As a third step, demographics information is extracted out of the valid users, namely gender, age, ethnicity and location information. Finally, the political polarity of the users with respect to the analyzed event is predicted. In the scope of this work, ou…
Society's reliance on social media as a primary source of news has spawned a renewed focus on the spread of misinformation. In this work, we identify the differences in how social media accounts identified as bots react to news sources of varying credibility, regardless of the veracity of the content those sources have shared. We analyze bot and human responses annotated using a fine-grained model that labels responses as being an answer, appreciation, agreement, disagreement, an elaboration, humor, or a negative reaction. We present key findings of our analysis into the prevalence of bots, th…
Bots are user accounts in social media which are controlled by computer programs. Similar to many other things, they are used for both good and evil purposes. One nefarious use-case for them is to spread misinformation or biased data in the networks. There are many pieces of research being performed based on social media data and their results validity is extremely threatened by the harmful data bots spread. Consequently, effective methods and tools are required for detecting bots and then removing misleading data spread by the bots. In the present research, a method for detecting Instagram bo…
Social media platforms have been trying to be more transparent about the political ads they run on their platforms, because the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that political campaigns are using social media on a large scale. One such transparency effort is the Facebook Ad Library, a public repository of all political ads run on Facebook and Instagram. This library provides journalist and researchers with data to get a better understanding of political advertising and microtargeting on Facebook's platforms. Unfortunately, the Facebook Ad Library only provides estimates and basic informati…
In the election, political parties communicate political information to people through social media. The followers receive the information, but can users who are not followers, political detachment users, receive the information? We focus on political detachment users who do not follow any political parties, and tackle the following research question: do political detachment users receive various political information during the election period? The results indicate that the answer is No. We determined that the political detachment users only receive the information of a few political parties.
