Detecting Bots and Assessing Their Impact in Social Networks
Published Online:1 Nov 2021https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2021.2118
References
- (2013) Opinion fluctuations and disagreement in social networks. Math. Oper. Res. 38(1):1–27.Link, Google Scholar
- (2011) Bayesian learning in social networks. Rev. Econom. Stud. 78(4):1201–1236.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2014) Data Classification: Algorithms and Applications (CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL).Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) Sok: The evolution of sybil defense via social networks. Proc. IEEE Sympos. Security Privacy (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ), 382–396.Google Scholar
- (2019) Protecting elections from social media manipulation. Sci. 365(6456):858–861.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2018) Analyzing the digital traces of political manipulation: The 2016 Russian interference Twitter campaign. Preprint, submitted February 12, https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04291.Google Scholar
- (1992) A simple model of herd behavior. Quart. J. Econom. 107(3):797–817.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2004) Word-of-mouth learning. Games Econom. Behav. 46(1):1–22.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (1982) On the computational complexity of Ising spin glass models. J. Phys. Math. General 15(10):3241.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2019) The Brexit botnet and user-generated hyperpartisan news. Soc. Sci. Comput. Rev. 37(1):38–54.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2010) Detecting spammers on Twitter. Proc. 7th Annual Collaboration Electr. Messaging Anti-Abuse Spam Conf. (ACM, New York).Google Scholar
- (2009) Detecting spammers and content promoters in online video social networks. Proc. 32nd Internat. ACM SIGIR Conf. Res. Development Inform. Retrieval (ACM, New York), 620–627.Google Scholar
- (2016) Social bots distort the 2016 US presidential election online discussion. First Monday 21(11), http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i11.7090.Google Scholar
- (2013) CopyCatch: Stopping group attacks by spotting lockstep behavior in social networks. Proc. 22nd Internat. Conf. World Wide Web (ACM, New York), 119–130.Google Scholar
- (1992) A theory of fads, fashion, custom, and cultural change as informational cascades. J. Political Econom. 100(5):992–1026.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) Design and analysis of a social botnet. Comput. Networks 57(2):556–578.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2016) How the bot-y politic influenced this election. MIT Technol. Rev. (November 8), https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/11/08/69674/how-the-bot-y-politic-influenced-this-election.Google Scholar
- (2012) Aiding the detection of fake accounts in large scale social online services. Proc. 9th USENIX Conf. Networked Systems Design Implementation, San Jose, CA, April 25–27, 197–210.Google Scholar
- (2014) Uncovering large groups of active malicious accounts in online social networks. Proc. 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conf. Comput. Comm. Security (ACM, New York), 477–488.Google Scholar
- (1977) Toward consensus: Some convergence theorems on repeated averaging. J. Appl. Probab. 14(1):89–97.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2015) Dynamical response of networks under external perturbations: Exact results. J. Statist. Phys. 159(2):221–230.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2015) keras, https://github.com/fchollet/keras.Google Scholar
- (2012) Detecting automation of Twitter accounts: Are you a human, bot, or cyborg? IEEE Trans. Dependable Secure Comput. 9(6):811–824.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (1973) A model for spatial conflict. Biometrika 60(3):581–588.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (1986) Diffusive clustering in the two dimensional voter model. Ann. Probab. 14(2):347–370.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2009) Sybilinfer: Detecting sybil nodes using social networks. Proc. NDSS Sympos., 1–15.Google Scholar
- (2016) BotOrNot: A system to evaluate social bots. Proc. 25th Internat. Conf. Companion World Wide Web (International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Geneva), 273–274.Google Scholar
- (1974) Reaching a consensus. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 69(345):118–121.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) COMPA: Detecting compromised accounts on social networks. Proc. NDSS Sympos., 1–17.Google Scholar
- (2014) Ethical considerations when employing fake identities in online social networks for research. Sci. Engrg. Ethics 20(4):1027–1043.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2017) Senator berates Twitter over ‘inadequate’ inquiry into Russian meddling. New York Times (September 28), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/us/politics/twitter-russia-interference-2016-election-investigation.html.Google Scholar
- (2017) Disinformation and social bot operations in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election. First Monday 22(8), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i8.8005.Google Scholar
- (2016) The rise of social bots. Commun. ACM 59(7):96–104.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2015) Reverse engineering socialbot infiltration strategies in Twitter. Proc. Internat. Conf. Adv. Soc. Network Anal. Mining (Curran Associates, Red Hook, NY), 25–32.Google Scholar
- (2007) The role of inflexible minorities in the breaking of democratic opinion dynamics. Physica A Statist. Mech. Appl. 381:366–376.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) Opinion dynamics in social networks: A local interaction game with stubborn agents. Proc. Amer. Control Conf. (Curran Associates, Red Hook, NY), 1982–1987.Google Scholar
- (2012) Understanding and combating link farming in the Twitter social network. Proc. 21st Internat. Conf. World Wide Web (ACM, New York), 61–70.Google Scholar
- (1986) Duality for general attractive spin systems with applications in one dimension. Ann. Probab. 14(2):371–396.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2016) How Twitter bots are shaping the election. The Atlantic (November 1), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/election-bots/506072/.Google Scholar
- (2014) Text-based Twitter user geolocation prediction. J. Artificial Intelligence Res. 49:451–500.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (1975) Ergodic theorems for weakly interacting infinite systems and the voter model. Ann. Probab. 3(4):643–663.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2018) Optimizing opinions with stubborn agents under time-varying dynamics. Preprint, submitted June 29, https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.11253.Google Scholar
- (2012) Socialbots: Voices from the fronts. Interactions 19(2):38–45.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (1925) Beitrag zur theorie des ferromagnetismus. Zeitschrift Phys. 31(1):253–258.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2010) Social and Economic Networks (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ).Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2003) Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules. IEEE Trans. Automatic Control 48(6):988–1001.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2015) Geolocation prediction in Twitter using social networks: A critical analysis and review of current practice. Proc. 9th Internat. AAAI Conf. Web Soc. Media (AAAI Press, Palo Alto, CA), 188–197.Google Scholar
- (2003) Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. Proc. 9th ACM SIGKDD Internat. Conf. Knowledge Discovery Data Mining (ACM, New York), 137–146.Google Scholar
- (2005) Influential nodes in a diffusion model for social networks. Caires L, Italiano GF, Monteiro L, Palamidessi C, Yung M, eds. Automata, Languages and Programming (Springer, Berlin), 1127–1138.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2014) Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. Preprint, submitted August 25, https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.5882.Google Scholar
- (2018) Finding extremists in online social networks. Oper. Res. 66(4):957–976.Link, Google Scholar
- (2002) What energy functions can be minimized via graph cuts? Heyden A, Sparr G, Nielsen M, Johansen P, eds. Proc. 7th Eur. Conf. Comput. Vision—Part III (Springer, Berlin), 65–81.Google Scholar
- (1992) Kinetics of monomer-monomer surface catalytic reactions. Phys. Rev. A 45(2):1067.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2011) Seven months with the devils: A long-term study of content polluters on Twitter. Proc. 5th Internat. AAAI Conf. Weblogs Social Media (AAAI Press, Palo Alto, CA), 185–192.Google Scholar
- (2012) Interacting Particle Systems (Springer, Berlin).Google Scholar
- (2016) United States presidential election tweet IDs, Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PDI7IN.Google Scholar
- (2017) Building a location-based set of social media users. Preprint, submitted November 4, https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01481.Google Scholar
- (2013) Building up of individual inflexibility in opinion dynamics. Phys. Rev. E 87(4):042807.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) You followed my bot! Transforming robots into influential users in Twitter. First Monday 18(7), https://doi.org/ 10.5210/fm.v18i7.4217.Google Scholar
- (2003) Does a single zealot affect an infinite group of voters? Phys. Rev. Lett. 91(2):028701.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2007) On the role of zealotry in the voter model. J. Statist. Mech. Theory Experiment 2007:P08029.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2017) Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots. PLoS One 12(9):e0184148.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) Social influence and the collective dynamics of opinion formation. PLoS One 8(11):e78433.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2009) Convergence speed in distributed consensus and averaging. SIAM J. Control Optim. 48(1):33–55.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2017) Creation and management of social network honeypots for detecting targeted cyber attacks. IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. 4(3):65–79.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2018) The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election. New York Times (February 16), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/16/us/politics/russia-propaganda-election-2016.html.Google Scholar
- (2018) Democrats urge Facebook and Twitter to probe Russian bots. CNET (January 23), https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-and-twitter-asked-again-to-investigate-russian-bots/.Google Scholar
- (2011) Detecting and tracking political abuse in social media. Proc. 5th Internat. AAAI Conf. Weblogs Social Media (AAAI Press, Palo Alto, CA), 297–304.Google Scholar
- (1970) Homophily-heterophily: Relational concepts for communication research. Public Opinion Quart. 34(4):523–538.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2005) Causal inference using potential outcomes: Design, modeling, decisions. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 100(469):322–331.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2017) The fake Americans Russia created to influence the election. New York Times (September 7), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html.Google Scholar
- (2005) Voter model on heterogeneous graphs. Phys. Rev. Lett. 94(17):178701.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2011) Facebook immune system. Proc. 4th Workshop Soc. Network Systems (ACM, New York), 1–8.Google Scholar
- (2017a) Macron Leaks tweets (May 17), https://archive.org/details/MacronleaksTweets.Google Scholar
- (2017b) BlackLivesMatter tweets 2016 (October 17), https://archive.org/details/blacklivesmatter-tweets-2016.txt.Google Scholar
- (2017) Pro-Russian bots sharpen online attacks for 2018 U.S. vote. Bloomberg (September 1), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-01/russia-linked-bots-hone-online-attack-plans-for-2018-u-s-vote.Google Scholar
- (2011) Suspended accounts in retrospect: An analysis of Twitter spam. Proc. 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conf. Internet Measurement (ACM, New York), 243–258.Google Scholar
- (2018) Twitter is sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at risk. Washington Post (July 6), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/06/twitter-is-sweeping-out-fake-accounts-like-never-before-putting-user-growth-risk/.Google Scholar
- (2009) Sybil-resilient online content voting. Proc. 6th USENIX Sympos. Networked Systems Design Implementation, 15–28.Google Scholar
- (1984) Problems in decentralized decision making and computation. Technical report, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
- (1986) Distributed asynchronous deterministic and stochastic gradient optimization algorithms. IEEE Trans. Automatic Control 31(9):803–812.Crossref, Google Scholar
- Twitter (2012) Using the Twitter search API (October), https://dev.twitter.com/docs/using-search.Google Scholar
- U.S. Department of Defense (2012) Information operations, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-13, Department of Defense, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
- (2014) Message passing optimization of harmonic influence centrality. IEEE Trans. Control Network Systems 1(1):109–120.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2014) Towards detecting anomalous user behavior in online social networks. Proc. 23rd USENIX Security Sympos., 223–238.Google Scholar
- (2018) The spread of true and false news online. Science 359(6380):1146–1151.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2010) Detecting spam bots in online social networking sites: A machine learning approach. Data Appl. Security Privacy XXIV (Springer, Berlin), 335–342.Google Scholar
- (2013) You are how you click: Clickstream analysis for Sybil detection. Proc. 22nd USENIX Security Sympos., 241–256.Google Scholar
- (2012) Social Turing tests: Crowdsourcing sybil detection. Preprint, submitted May 17, https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.3856.Google Scholar
- (2018) Russian bid to influence Brexit vote detailed in new US senate report. The Guardian (January 10), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/10/russian-influence-brexit-vote-detailed-us-senate-report.Google Scholar
- (2004) Social structure and opinion formation. Preprint, submitted July 9, https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0407252.Google Scholar
- (2014) Uncovering social network Sybils in the wild. ACM Trans. Knowledge Discovery Data 8(1):2.Google Scholar
- (2009) Detecting spam in a Twitter network. First Monday 15(1), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/2793/2431.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2013) Binary opinion dynamics with stubborn agents. ACM Trans. Econom. Comput. 1(4):19.Google Scholar
- (2006) SybilGuard: Defending against Sybil attacks via social networks. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Comm. Rev. 36(4):267–278.Crossref, Google Scholar
- (2008) SybilLimit: A near-optimal social network defense against sybil attacks. Proc. IEEE Sympos. Security Privacy (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ), 3–17.Google Scholar
- (2004) Spatially coherent clustering using graph cuts. Proc. 2004 IEEE Comput. Soc. Conf. Comput. Vision Pattern Recognition, vol. 2 (IEEE, Piscataway, NJ), II-437–II-444.Google Scholar
- (2014) Sorry, I was hacked: A classification of compromised Twitter accounts. Proc. 29th Annual ACM Sympos. Appl. Comput. (ACM, New York), 587–593.Google Scholar

