Emilio Ferrara discusses “The Rise of Social Bots” on the July 2016 Communications of the ACM.
Our review paper on the rise of social bots has appeared on the cover of the July 2016 issue of Communications of the ACM and is the subject of my interview above!
Social bots populate techno-social systems: they are often benign, or even useful, but some are created to harm, by tampering with, manipulating, and deceiving social media users. Social bots have been used to infiltrate political discourse, manipulate the stock market, steal personal information, and spread misinformation. The detection of social bots is therefore an important research endeavor. A taxonomy of the different social bot detection systems proposed in the literature accounts for network-based techniques, crowdsourcing strategies, feature-based supervised learning, and hybrid systems.
Cite as:
Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini. The Rise of Social Bots. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 7, Pages 96-104