A New Joint Approach with Temporal and Profile Information for Social Bot Detection

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of online social networks (OSNs), a huge number of social bots have emerged. Social bots are involved in various cybercrimes like cyberbullying and rumor dissemination, which have seriously affected the normal order of OSNs. Nowadays, existing studies in this field almost focus on English OSNs like Twitter and Facebook. However, it is difficult to directly apply these detection technologies to Sina Weibo, which is one of the largest Chinese microblogging services in the world. In addition, social bots are evolving rapidly and time-consuming feature engineering may not perform well in detecting newly emerging social bots. In this paper, we propose a new joint approach with Temporal and Profile information for social bot detection (TPBot). The approach includes data collection module, feature extraction module, and detection module. To begin with, data collection module uses a web crawler to obtain user data from Sina Weibo. Next, the feature extraction module regards the user posts as temporal data to extract temporal-semantic and temporal-metadata features. Furthermore, this module extracts features based on users’ profile. Finally, a detection model based on BiGRU and attention mechanism is designed in the detection module. The results show that TPBot performs better than baselines with the F1-score of 0.9837 on the Sina Weibo dataset. Moreover, we have also conducted an experiment on the two datasets collected from Twitter to evaluate the generalization ability of TPBot. It is found that TPBot outperforms baselines on the new datasets and has good generalization ability.