A Behavioural Analysis of Credulous Twitter Users

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the behavior of credulous Twitter users who follow many bots, identifying lightweight features to detect them and understanding their role in spreading false information.

Contribution

It improves credulous user classification with detailed feature analysis and highlights behavioral differences in interactions with bots.

Findings

Credulous users tend to amplify bot content more.

Lightweight features are effective for detection.

Detection aids in understanding misinformation spread.

Abstract

Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific segments of the population. We have seen how false information can be spread using automated accounts, known as bots. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we investigate behavioural attitudes of so called `credulous' users, i.e., genuine accounts following many bots. Leveraging our previous work, where supervised learning is successfully applied to single out credulous users, we improve the classification task with a detailed features' analysis and provide evidence that simple and lightweight features are crucial to detect such users. Furthermore, we study the differences in the way credulous and not credulous users interact with bots and discover that credulous users tend to amplify more the content posted by bots and argue that their detection can be instrumental to get useful information on possible dissemination of spam content, propaganda, and, in general, little or no reliable information.