Measuring social spam and the effect of bots on information diffusion in social media

TL;DR

This paper investigates how social bots influence information spread and spam campaigns on social media, highlighting differences in diffusion dynamics between bots and humans, especially in political contexts.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of bot and human content diffusion and characterizes bot behaviors in social media spam campaigns.

Findings

Bots significantly alter information diffusion patterns.

Distinct diffusion characteristics between bot-generated and human-generated content.

Insights into bot roles in political communication and spam campaigns.

Abstract

Bots have been playing a crucial role in online platform ecosystems, as efficient and automatic tools to generate content and diffuse information to the social media human population. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of social bots in content spreading dynamics in social media. In particular, we will first investigate some differences between diffusion dynamics of content generated by bots, as opposed to humans, in the context of political communication, then study the characteristics of bots behind the diffusion dynamics of social media spam campaigns.