The rise of social bots

By Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Clayton A. Davis, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini. 2014

2,064 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Today's social bots are sophisticated and sometimes menacing. Indeed, their presence can endanger online ecosystems as well as our society.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Information Systems

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “Bots and spamming accounts are increasingly prevalent (Abokhodair et al., 2015; Ferrara et al., 2016).”
How algorithmic popularity bias hinders or promotes quality (2017, background): “gs | severely undermines the reliability of the popularity signals [21]. Second, engagement and popularity metrics are subject to manipulation, for example by fake reviews, social bots, and astroturf [27, 9]. Popularity bias can have more subtle eects. The use of popularity in ranking algorithms by ”
Twitter's Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility (2016, methodology): “We cross-checked the effectiveness of this approach by using the ‘bot-or-not’ API, which implements a machine learningbased method with many features (Ferrara et al. 2014).”
Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set (2020, background): “Twitter has long been used by the research community as a means to understand dynamics observable in online social networks, from information dissemination [11,12] to the prevalence and influence of bots and misinformation [13,14].”
Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda (2019, background): “In social media settings, bots or social bots can refer to software-based robots that explicitly generate text to create a kind of arti ﬁ cial buzz, often to manipulate or deceive social media users (Ferrara, Varol, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2016).”
False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey (2018, background): “, by retweeting, to a large audience, and second, by following each other to increase the social status of the accounts and apparent trustworthiness of information [26, 97].”
The future of social media in marketing (2019, background): “Indeed, social bots (computer algorithms that automatically produce content and interact with social media users; Ferrara et al. 2016) have inhabited social media platforms for the last decade (Lee et al. 2011), and have become increasingly pervasive.”
Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systems (2018, neutral): “A great deal of research aims to address this issue, including our own efforts [1,2] and others’ [3-6].”
The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations (2018, background): “Many interesting future questions arise from algorithms masquerading as humans [107], requiring new technological (algorithmic) solutions to be developed.”
Should ChatGPT be Biased? Challenges and Risks of Bias in Large Language Models (2023, background): “Their proﬁciency in producing diverse forms of content, including articles, social media posts, and marketing materials, has been widely recognized [23].”
The anatomy of online deception: what makes automated text convincing? (2016, background): “Known as ‘social bots’, they can automatically produce content and interact with users [10], and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated.”
BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots (2016, background): “1 An extensive review about social bots and their roles in online social networks is presented in a forthcoming article [2].”
Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective (2017, methodology): “In addition, the rise of social bots has also increased the circulation of false information as they automatically retweet posts without verifying the facts [23].”