Social bots and the spread of fake news
Christopher Torres-Lugo
Observatory on Social Media
Marvin
Bots
fact-checking low-credibility
15,053 articles 389,569 claims
1,133,674 tweets 13,617,425 tweets
kmin=5, N=52,452PLoS ONE 2018
Report: three million votes in presidential election cast by illegal aliens
Nature Communications 2018
Humans retweet bots as often
as they retweet humans
Humans do most of the retweeting
#SB277CACM 2016
breaking up the botnet
10%
Sune's student bot
Introducing BotSlayer
Docker image running on AWS
DatabaseStreaming
filteringAPI
Real-time statistics dashboard
Research data collection API
Coordinated trend event
reports
Entity extractor
Anomaly detector
Client API
BotSlayer architecture
osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer/
Journal of Open Source Software 2019
Examples
2019-07-10 11AM, attack on Bill Browder and Kamala Harris
Attack on Bill Browder
Visualization by Hoaxy
Coordination Detection Framework
4
Id
Name
@Handle
Creation Date...
1
User ID Trace
2
User ID Feature
3
Project
Cluster
EngineerExtract
...
Framework applicationsFlorida, POTUS, BackfireTrump, Florida,
POTUS,BackfireTrump, Illinois, POTUS,
BackfireTrump, Missouri, POTUS,
BackfireTrump, Washington, POTUS,
BackfireTrump, Texas, POTUS, BackfireTrump,
Tennessee, POTUS, BackfireTrump, Virginia,
POTUS, BackfireTrump
CreepyJoeBiden, LasVegas, Trump,
Houston, Trump, TedCruz, Trump,
Houston, MAGARally, TedCruz,
Facebook, America, DeepState,
Trump, Trump, Obama, Trump,
CreepyPornLawyer,
MichaelAvenatti,
CreepyPornLawyer,
MichaelAvenatti, Texas, Trump,
MAGARally
Hashtag coordination Image coordination
osome.iuni.iu.edu
Marcella Tambuscio
Thanks!