Do Social Bots Dream of Electric Sheep? A Categorisation of Social Media Bot Accounts

TL;DR

This paper reviews existing research on social media bots, proposing a categorisation scheme based on imitation and intent to clarify their roles and differences from other bots.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic review of social media bot research and proposes a novel categorisation scheme based on imitation and intent.

Findings

Developed a taxonomy for social media bots

Identified key dimensions: imitation and intent

Clarified distinctions between social bots and other bots

Abstract

So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the results of this literature review, we propose a scheme for categorising bot accounts on social media sites. Our scheme groups bot accounts by two dimensions - Imitation of human behaviour and Intent.