Counter-Radicalization Bot Research: Using Social Bots to Fight Violent Extremism

Abstract

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BotPercent: Estimating Bot Populations in Twitter Communities

“…Twitter accounts controlled by automated programs, also known as Twitter bots, have become a widely recognized, concerning, and studied phenomenon (Ferrara et al, 2016a;Aiello et al, 2012). Twitter bots have been deployed with malicious intents, such as disinformation spread (Cui et al, 2020;Lu and Li, 2020;Huang et al, 2022), interference in elections (Howard et al, 2016;Bradshaw et al, 2017;Ferrara et al, 2016a;Rossi et al, 2020), promotion of extremism (Ferrara et al, 2016b;Marcellino et al, 2020), and the spread of conspiracy theories (Ferrara, 2020;Ahmed et al, 2020). These triggered the development of automatic Twitter bot detection models aiming at mitigating harms from bots' malicious interference (Cresci, 2020).…”

TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection

“…Automated users on Twitter, also known as Twitter bots, have become a widely known and welldocumented phenomenon. Over the past decade, malicious Twitter bots were responsible for a wide range of problems such as online disinformation [Cui et al, 2020, Lu and Li, 2020, election interference [Howard et al, 2016, Neudert et al, 2017, Rossi et al, 2020, Ferrara, 2017, extremism campaign [Ferrara et al, 2016, Marcellino et al, 2020, and even the spread of conspiracy theories [Ferrara, 2020, Ahmed et al, 2020, Anwar et al, 2021. These societal challenges have called for automatic Twitter bot detection models to mitigate their negative influence.…”