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Register a new userMining Influentials and their Bot Activities on Twitter Campaigns
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Added by
Kwan Hui Lim Dr
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter campaigns, which includes: (i) collecting tweets and detecting topics relating to a campaign; (ii) mining important campaign topics using scientometrics measures; (iii) modelling user interests using hashtags and topical entropy; (iv) identifying influential users using an adapted PageRank score; and (v) various metrics and visualization techniques for identifying bot-like activities. While this methodology is generalizable to multiple campaign types, we demonstrate its effectiveness on the 2017 German federal election.
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Twitter has become a vital social media platform while an ample amount of malicious Twitter bots exist and induce undesirable social effects. Successful Twitter bot detection proposals are generally supervised, which rely heavily on large-scale datasets. However, existing benchmarks generally suffer from low levels of user diversity, limited user information and data scarcity. Therefore, these datasets are not sufficient to train and stably benchmark bot detection measures. To alleviate these problems, we present TwiBot-20, a massive Twitter bot detection benchmark, which contains 229,573 users, 33,488,192 tweets, 8,723,736 user property items and 455,958 follow relationships. TwiBot-20 covers diversified bots and genuine users to better represent the real-world Twittersphere. TwiBot-20 also includes three modals of user information to support both binary classification of single users and community-aware approaches. To the best of our knowledge, TwiBot-20 is the largest Twitter bot detection benchmark to date. We reproduce competitive bot detection methods and conduct a thorough evaluation on TwiBot-20 and two other public datasets. Experiment results demonstrate that existing bot detection measures fail to match their previously claimed performance on TwiBot-20, which suggests that Twitter bot detection remains a challenging task and requires further research efforts.
Twitter users operated by automated programs, also known as bots, have increased their appearance recently and induced undesirable social effects. While extensive research efforts have been devoted to the task of Twitter bot detection, previous methods leverage only a small fraction of user semantic and profile information, which leads to their failure in identifying bots that exploit multi-modal user information to disguise as genuine users. Apart from that, the state-of-the-art bot detectors fail to leverage user follow relationships and the graph structure it forms. As a result, these methods fall short of capturing new generations of Twitter bots that act in groups and seem genuine individually. To address these two challenges of Twitter bot detection, we propose BotRGCN, which is short for Bot detection with Relational Graph Convolutional Networks. BotRGCN addresses the challenge of community by constructing a heterogeneous graph from follow relationships and apply relational graph convolutional networks to the Twittersphere. Apart from that, BotRGCN makes use of multi-modal user semantic and property information to avoid feature engineering and augment its ability to capture bots with diversified disguise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BotRGCN outperforms competitive baselines on a comprehensive benchmark TwiBot-20 which provides follow relationships. BotRGCN is also proved to effectively leverage three modals of user information, namely semantic, property and neighborhood information, to boost bot detection performance.
Twitter bot detection has become an important and challenging task to combat misinformation and protect the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art approaches generally leverage the topological structure of the Twittersphere, while they neglect the heterogeneity of relations and influence among users. In this paper, we propose a novel bot detection framework to alleviate this problem, which leverages the topological structure of user-formed heterogeneous graphs and models varying influence intensity between users. Specifically, we construct a heterogeneous information network with users as nodes and diversified relations as edges. We then propose relational graph transformers to model heterogeneous influence between users and learn node representations. Finally, we use semantic attention networks to aggregate messages across users and relations and conduct heterogeneity-aware Twitter bot detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a comprehensive Twitter bot detection benchmark. Additional studies also bear out the effectiveness of our proposed relational graph transformers, semantic attention networks and the graph-based approach in general.
Twitter has become a major social media platform since its launching in 2006, while complaints about bot accounts have increased recently. Although extensive research efforts have been made, the state-of-the-art bot detection methods fall short of generalizability and adaptability. Specifically, previous bot detectors leverage only a small fraction of user information and are often trained on datasets that only cover few types of bots. As a result, they fail to generalize to real-world scenarios on the Twittersphere where different types of bots co-exist. Additionally, bots in Twitter are constantly evolving to evade detection. Previous efforts, although effective once in their context, fail to adapt to new generations of Twitter bots. To address the two challenges of Twitter bot detection, we propose SATAR, a self-supervised representation learning framework of Twitter users, and apply it to the task of bot detection. In particular, SATAR generalizes by jointly leveraging the semantics, property and neighborhood information of a specific user. Meanwhile, SATAR adapts by pre-training on a massive number of self-supervised users and fine-tuning on detailed bot detection scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SATAR outperforms competitive baselines on different bot detection datasets of varying information completeness and collection time. SATAR is also proved to generalize in real-world scenarios and adapt to evolving generations of social media bots.
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or trolls. Although they are often involved in spreading disinformation on social media, there is little understanding of how these trolls operate, what type of content they disseminate, and most importantly their influence on the information ecosystem. In this paper, we shed light on these questions by analyzing 27K tweets posted by 1K Twitter users identified as having ties with Russias Internet Research Agency and thus likely state-sponsored trolls. We compare their behavior to a random set of Twitter users, finding interesting differences in terms of the content they disseminate, the evolution of their account, as well as their general behavior and use of Twitter. Then, using Hawkes Processes, we quantify the influence that trolls had on the dissemination of news on social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. Overall, our findings indicate that Russian trolls managed to stay active for long periods of time and to reach a substantial number of Twitter users with their tweets. When looking at their ability of spreading news content and making it viral, however, we find that their effect on social platforms was minor, with the significant exception of news published by the Russian state-sponsored news outlet RT (Russia Today).
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