Of Bots and Humans (on Twitter)
Zafar Gilani, Reza Farahbakhsh, Gareth Tyson, Liang Wang, Jon Crowcroft · 2017
Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our previous work (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on Twitter, one of the largest OSNs in the world. We collect a large-scale Twitter dataset and define various metrics based on tweet metadata. Using a human annotation task we assign 'bot' and 'human' ground-truth labels to the dataset, and compare the annotations against an online bot detection tool for evaluation. We then ask a series of questions to discern important behavioural characteristics of bots and humans using metrics within and among four popularity groups. From the comparative analysis we draw differences and interesting similarities between the two entities, thus paving the way for reliable classification of bots, and studying automated political infiltration and advertisement campaigns.