Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) are a major component of societal digitalization. OSNs alter how people communicate, make decisions, and form or change their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Thus, they can now impact social groups, financial systems, and political communication at scale. As one type of OSN, social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, serve as outlets for users to convey information to an audience as broad or targeted as the user desires. Over the years, these social media platforms have been infected with automated accounts, or bots, that are capable of hijacking conversations, influencing other users, and manipulating content dissemination. Although benign bots exist to facilitate legitimate activities, we focus on bots designed to perform malicious acts through social media platforms. Bots that mimic the social behaviors of humans are referred to as social bots. Social bots …

Date

2021

Authors

Tuja Khaund, Baris Kirdemir, Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Fred Morstatter

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

Volume

9

Issue

2

Pages

530-545

Publisher

IEEE