FIGHTING AGAINST SOCIAL BOTS: THE ISSUE OF IDENTIFICATION
Dmitrii Pianov · OpenSIUC (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) · 2018
Widespread use of social bots becomes an important issue in the social media policy making. Automatic users are used to promote political ideas, advertise, and derail the public discourse. Identifying the bots have become an increasingly difficult task due to sophistication of the tools used to run them. In this paper I explore the domain of social bot detection. The difficulty of bot classification is well studied (Kudugunta and Ferrara (2018a), Cresci, Pietro, Petrocchi, Spognardi, and Tesconi (2017)) and arises due to high dimensionality of the data and unbalanceness of the classes. In this paper, we attempt to improve the algorithm used to detect the bots by exploiting character based GRU infrastructure. We train our model on the labeled data consisted of 8 million of human- and bot-generated tweets. For a reference, we are using several other classifiers as a benchmark to estimate the performance of the model.