Abstract
Bots, social media accounts controlled by software rather than by humans, have recently been under the spotlight for their association with various forms of online manipulation. To date, much work has focused on social bot detection, but little attention has been devoted to the characterization and measurement of the behavior and activity of bots, as opposed to humans'. Over the course of the years, bots have become more sophisticated, and to some extent capable of emulating the short-term behavior of human users. The goal of this paper is to study the behavioral dynamics that bots exhibit over the course of an activity session, and highlight if and how these differ from human activity signatures. By using a large Twitter dataset associated with recent political events, we first separate bots and humans, then isolate their activity sessions. We compile a list of quantities to be measured, like the propensity of users to engage in social interactions or to produce content. Our analysis highlights the presence of short-term behavioral trends in humans, which can be associated with a cognitive origin, that are absent in bots, intuitively due to the automated nature of their activity. These findings are finally codified to create and evaluate a machine learning algorithm to detect activity sessions produced by bots and humans, to allow for more nuanced bot detection strategies.
Highlights
Social bots are all those social media accounts that are controlled by artificial, as opposed to human, intelligence
We focus on four quantities: the fraction of retweets (Figure 4A), and the fraction of replies (Figure 4B), among all tweets posted at a certain position in a session; the number of mentions appearing in a tweet (Figure 4C); and the length of the tweet itself, in characters (Figure 4D)
In the present work we have investigated the behavioral dynamics of social network users over the course of an online session, with particular attention to the differences emerging between human and bot accounts under this perspective
Summary
Social bots are all those social media accounts that are controlled by artificial, as opposed to human, intelligence. The capabilities of bots have significantly improved: bots rely on the fast-paced advancements of Artificial Intelligence, especially in the area of natural language generation, and use pre-trained multilingual models like OpenAI’s GPT-2 [15] to generate human-like content. This framework allows the creation of bots that generate genuine-looking short texts on platforms like Twitter, making it harder to distinguish between human and automated accounts [16]
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