Social Bots: Detection and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews the presence, impact, and detection challenges of malicious social bots on social media, highlighting recent advances and providing practical guidance for researchers.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of social bot detection challenges and discusses Botometer as a case study, along with practical research guidance.

Findings

Social bots influence online discussions and social media integrity.

Detection methods face significant challenges due to bot sophistication.

Botometer exemplifies recent detection tool developments.

Abstract

While social media are a key source of data for computational social science, their ease of manipulation by malicious actors threatens the integrity of online information exchanges and their analysis. In this Chapter, we focus on malicious social bots, a prominent vehicle for such manipulation. We start by discussing recent studies about the presence and actions of social bots in various online discussions to show their real-world implications and the need for detection methods. Then we discuss the challenges of bot detection methods and use Botometer, a publicly available bot detection tool, as a case study to describe recent developments in this area. We close with a practical guide on how to handle social bots in social media research.