Demystifying Social Bots: On the Intelligence of Automated Social Media Actors
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Recently, social bots, (semi-) automatized accounts in social media, gained global attention in the context of public opinion manipulation. Dystopian scenarios like the malicious amplification of topics, the spreading of disinformation, and the manipulation of elections through “opinion machines” created headlines around the globe. As a consequence, much research effort has been put into the classification and detection of social bots. Yet, it is still unclear how easy an average online media user can purchase social bots, which platforms they target, where they originate from, and how sophisticated these bots are. This work provides a much needed new perspective on these questions. By providing insights into the markets of social bots in the clearnet and darknet as well as an exhaustive analysis of freely available software tools for automation during the last decade, we shed light on the availability and capabilities of automated profiles in social media platforms. Our results confirm the increasing importance of social bot technology but also uncover an as yet unknown discrepancy of theoretical and practically achieved artificial intelligence in social bots: while literature reports on a high degree of intelligence for chat bots and assumes the same for social bots, the observed degree of intelligence in social bot implementations is limited. In fact, the overwhelming majority of available services and software are of supportive nature and merely provide modules of automation instead of fully fledged “intelligent” social bots.
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Traditional social bots typically lack the intelligence to create realistic personas, post convincing content, or carry out natural conversations automatically.
“They typically lack the intelligence to create realistic personas, post convincing content, or carry out natural conversations with other accounts automatically (Assenmacher et al., 2020).”
From Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet (2024) · cites this paper as Assenmacher et al., 2020
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- Authors
- Assenmacher, D., Clever, L., Frischlich, L., Quandt, T., Trautmann, H., & Grimme, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Münster (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Assenmacher, Dennis
- ORCID
- Venue
- Social Media + Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2020-07
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 2056-3051 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3081846154
- Cited by
- 100
- References
- 57
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 15.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Social Media + Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Open access LMU (Ludwid Maxmilian's Universitat Munchen) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- social bots, social media automation, dark web, bot detection, disinformation, opinion manipulation, electoral manipulation, chatbots, social networking sites
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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