BotSlayer: real-time detection of bot amplification on Twitter
Pik-Mai Hui, Kai‐Cheng Yang, Christopher Torres-Lugo, Zachary Monroe, Marc McCarty, Benjamin Serrette, Valentin Pentchev, Filippo Menczer · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2019
As social media became major platforms for political campaigns and discussions of other important issues, concerns have been growing about manipulation of the information ecosystem by bad actors.Typical techniques used by the bad actors vary from astroturf (Ratkiewicz, Conover, Meiss, Gonçalves, et al., 2011; Ratkiewicz, Conover, Meiss, Gonçalves, et al., 2011) and amplification of misinformation (Shao, Ciampaglia, et al., 2018;Shao, Hui, et al., 2018) to trolling (Zannettou et al., 2018).Attempts to manipulate discussions may and often does involve real humans; examples include trolls from Russia (Badawy, Addawood, Lerman, & Ferrara, 2019;Kim, Graham, Wan, & Rizoiu, 2019;Zannettou et al., 2018) and Iran (Zannettou et al., 2019).Recent reports show that malicious social bots -inauthentic accounts controlled in part by software -have been active during the U.S.