Screening Out Social Bots Interference: Are There Any Silver Bullets?
Abstract
Social networks are a primary source of news and information that can be steered, distorted, and influenced. Recent scandals such as the one involving Cambridge Analytics proved that social media users are prone to such direct manipulation. Among the weapons available to perform these anti-democracy attacks, Social Bots are beyond question the most powerful one. These autonomous entities constitute coordinated armies that sneakily manipulate and deceive real users. Thus, our research identifies five major challenges that the research community needs to face toward tackling Social Bots activities in four individual but comparable scenarios. To address these key challenges, we propose, elaborate, and evaluate a mix of remedies in the form of a proof-of-concept platform combining the agility of artificial intelligence with the expertise of human analysts to detect and shield against Social Bots interference.
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The average presence of bots was estimated to be around 11% of all Facebook accounts in 2019.
“and 11% of all Facebook accounts in 2019 [38]”
From A decade of social bot detection (2020) · cites this paper as [38]
Cites
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A decade of social bot detection
Cresci, S. (2020) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/3409116 · Cited by 323 · see citing works
“was estimated to be in the region of 15% of all active Twitter accounts in 2017 [31], and 11% of all Facebook accounts in 2019 [38] – a considerable share indeed.”
Background
- Authors
- Zago, M., Nespoli, P., Papamartzivanos, D., Perez, M. G., Marmol, F. G., Kambourakis, G., & Perez, G. M.
- Affiliations
- Universidad de Murcia (ES)
- University of the Aegean (GR)
- Venue
- IEEE Communications Magazine
- Published
- 2019-08
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 98-104
- ISSN
- 0163-6804 (ISSN-L)
- 1558-1896
- OpenAlex
- W2969865156
- Cited by
- 30
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 6
- FWCI
- 3.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE Communications Magazine (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Keywords
- social bots, bot detection, disinformation, social media manipulation, Cambridge Analytica, human-in-the-loop, AI-based detection
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