On Profiling Bots in Social Media

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for profiling various types of social media bots, including benign ones, using extensive features and classifiers, based on analysis of over 159,000 Twitter accounts.

Contribution

It introduces a new broad categorization of social media bots and develops a systematic profiling framework with a rich feature set and classifier bank.

Findings

Benign bots are prevalent alongside malicious ones.

Key features differentiate bot types and behaviors.

Insights into bot behaviors across a large Twitter dataset.

Abstract

The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on profiling bots had been focused largely on malicious bots, with the assumption that these bots should be removed. In this work, however, we find many bots that are benign, and propose a new, broader categorization of bots based on their behaviors. This includes broadcast, consumption, and spam bots. To facilitate comprehensive analyses of bots and how they compare to human accounts, we develop a systematic profiling framework that includes a rich set of features and classifier bank. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performances of different classifiers under varying time windows, identify the key features of bots, and infer about bots in a larger Twitter population. Our analysis encompasses more than 159K bot and human (non-bot) accounts in Twitter. The results provide interesting insights on the behavioral traits of both benign and malicious bots.