Title
Dissecting a Social Botnet: Growth, Content and Influence in Twitter
Abstract
Social botnets have become an important phenomenon on social media. There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spam hashtags, scam twitter users, and astroturfing. In this paper we considered one specific social botnet in Twitter to understand how it grows over time, how the content of tweets by the social botnet differ from regular users in the same dataset, and lastly, how the social botnet may have influenced the relevant discussions. Our analysis is based on a qualitative coding for approximately 3000 tweets in Arabic and English from the Syrian social bot that was active for 35 weeks on Twitter before it was shutdown. We find that the growth, behavior and content of this particular botnet did not specifically align with common conceptions of botnets. Further we identify interesting aspects of the botnet that distinguish it from regular users.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2015
Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
arab spring,miscellaneous,bots,botnet,social computing,automated social actor,twitter
Field
DocType
Volume
World Wide Web,Internet privacy,Social media,Arabic,Botnet,Computer science,Coding (social sciences),Phenomenon,Social computing
Conference
abs/1604.03627
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
26
1.32
13
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Norah Abokhodair1667.35
Daisy Yoo212210.77
David W McDonald32787321.25