RoGBot: Relationship-Oblivious Graph-based Neural Network with Contextual Knowledge for Bot Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces RoGBot, a graph-based neural network that detects bots by combining textual, metadata, and behavioral features without relying on explicit user relationship data, achieving high accuracy across multiple datasets.

Contribution

RoGBot is a novel multimodal framework that integrates deep textual embeddings with user metadata and graph reasoning, eliminating the need for follower-following data.

Findings

Achieves up to 99.8% accuracy on Cresci-15 dataset

Effectively detects sophisticated bots with high robustness

Operates without explicit user relationship information

Abstract

Detecting automated accounts (bots) among genuine users on platforms like Twitter remains a challenging task due to the evolving behaviors and adaptive strategies of such accounts. While recent methods have achieved strong detection performance by combining text, metadata, and user relationship information within graph-based frameworks, many of these models heavily depend on explicit user-user relationship data. This reliance limits their applicability in scenarios where such information is unavailable. To address this limitation, we propose a novel multimodal framework that integrates detailed textual features with enriched user metadata while employing graph-based reasoning without requiring follower-following data. Our method uses transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) to extract deep semantic embeddings from tweets, which are aggregated using max pooling to form comprehensive user-level representations. These are further combined with auxiliary behavioral features and passed through a GraphSAGE model to capture both local and global patterns in user behavior. Experimental results on the Cresci-15, Cresci-17, and PAN 2019 datasets demonstrate the robustness of our approach, achieving accuracies of 99.8%, 99.1%, and 96.8%, respectively, and highlighting its effectiveness against increasingly sophisticated bot strategies.