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BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots

Published: 11 April 2016 Publication History

Abstract

While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate discussions, alter the popularity of users, pollute content and spread misinformation, and even perform terrorist propaganda and recruitment actions. Here we present BotOrNot, a publicly-available service that leverages more than one thousand features to evaluate the extent to which a Twitter account exhibits similarity to the known characteristics of social bots. Since its release in May 2014, BotOrNot has served over one million requests via our website and APIs.

References

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E. Ferrara, O. Varol, C. Davis, F. Menczer, and A. Flammini. The rise of social bots. Commun. ACM, in press. Preprint arXiv:1407.5225.
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K. Lee, B. D. Eoff, and J. Caverlee. Seven months with the devils: A long-term study of content polluters on Twitter. In Proc. 5th AAAI Intl. Conf. on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), pages 185--192, 2011.
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J. Ratkiewicz, M. Conover, M. Meiss, B. Gonçalves, S. Patil, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. Truthy: mapping the spread of astroturf in microblog streams. In Proc. 20th ACM Intl. World Wide Web Conf. Companion (WWW), pages 249--252, 2011.
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V. Subrahmanian, A. Azaria, S. Durst, V. Kagan, A. Galstyan, K. Lerman, L. Zhu, E. Ferrara, A. Flammini, F. Menczer, et al. The darpa twitter bot challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.05140, 2016.

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  1. BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '16 Companion: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web
    April 2016
    1094 pages
    ISBN:9781450341448

    Sponsors

    • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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    International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

    Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

    Publication History

    Published: 11 April 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. social bot
    2. social media
    3. sybil account

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    • Abstract

    Funding Sources

    • DARPA
    • NSF
    • J.S. McDonnell Foundation

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    WWW '16
    Sponsor:
    • IW3C2
    WWW '16: 25th International World Wide Web Conference
    April 11 - 15, 2016
    Québec, Montréal, Canada

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    WWW '16 Companion Paper Acceptance Rate 115 of 727 submissions, 16%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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