Social bots are algorithms that automatically produce content and interact with humans on social media to emulate and potentially manipulate human behavior. Around 9-15% of active Twitter accounts may be bots. Bots are used for marketing, entertainment, gaining followers, spamming, influencing opinions, and limiting free speech. About 30% of users can be deceived by bots. Identifying bots can be difficult as sophisticated bots mimic human behavior, but graph-based and feature-based methods analyze social networks and individual account features to detect bots with machine learning classifiers. The arms race between bot detection and deception will continue as long as deception remains effective.

1. The Emergence Of Social Bots
In Social Media
Aseel Addawood

4. 1950s
Alan Turing envisioned that one day
machines will except human intelligence.
4

5. Chatbots
Algorithms designed to hold a
conversation with a human.
5

6. What Is a Social
Bot?

7. 7
“Is a computer algorithm that
automatically produces content and
interacts with humans on social media,
trying to emulate and possibly alter
their behavior.”

8. 8
9-15%
of active Twitter accounts may be
bots
Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Davis, C. A., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2017, May). Online human-bot interactions: Detection,
estimation, and characterization. In Eleventh international AAAI conference on web and social media.

9. What are the intentions
of social bots?

10. Marketing and
Customer Service
10

11. Entertainment
11

12. Foster Fame
Having a huge number
of bots as followers can
help simulate real
success.

13. Spamming
Having advertising bots in
online chats is similar to
email spam, but a lot more
direct.

14. Mischief
Harming others by signing up an opponent with a
lot of fake identities and spam the account.

15. Bias Public Opinion
Influence trends by
countless messages of
similar content
advocating certain
ideas, with different
phrasings.

16. Limit Free Speech
Important messages can be pushed out of sight
by a deluge of automated bot messages. As
Hashtag overload, “denial of cognitive service”
attack

17. Psychological Warfare
"To denote any action which is
practiced mainly by psychological
methods with the aim of evoking a
planned psychological reaction in other
people"

18. Social Bots and Malicious
Behavior

19. 30%
Of users can be deceived by a bot
Shah, H., & Warwick, K. (2012). How the Good Life is Threatened in Cyberspace.
🏃🏃🏃

20. How Can We Identify
Social Bots?

21. ◇ Incessant activity
￭ Twitting all the time day and night
◇ High number of tweets
￭ 50-100 is the max a very active human user can produce,
more then this is suspicious.
◇ More following than followers.
◇ Mostly retweets and very few original posts.
◇ Recent account creation date.
◇ random looking Twitter user name.
◇ Narrow focus.

22. Sophisticated and Difficult to
detect

23. ￭ Real sounding names
￭ Keep human hours (stop at night)
￭ Engage in social behavior
￮ Share photos
￮ Use emoticons, LOL
￮ Converse with each other
￭ Create realistic social networks

24. Can We Spot Bots?

25. ◇ Graph-Based Social Bot Detection
￭ Bot detection systems based on social network information.
◇ Crowdsourcing Social Bot Detection
￭ Systems based on crowdsourcing and leveraging human
◇ Feature-Based Social Bot Detection
￭ Machine-learning methods based on the identification of
features that discriminate between bots and humans.

26. Bot Or Not?
Automatically classify Twitter accounts as human or bot based
on ~1000 different features.

27. “
Classes of features extracted by Bot or Not?

28. Classification Performance

29. “
Features discriminating social bots from humans

31. “
“The race will be over only when the
increased cost of deception will no longer be
justified due to the effectiveness of early
detection.”

32. Thanks!
Any questions?
You can find me at:
◇ @aseel_addawood
◇ aaddaw2@Illinois.edu
33
❤