Are Social Bots on Twitter Political Actors? Empirical Evidence from a Ukrainian Social Botnet

Type Document Author Simon Hegelich Author Dietmar Janetzko URL http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/viewPDFInterstitial/13015/12793 Date 2016/3/31 Abstract A considerable amount of data in social networks like Twitter is not generated by humans but by automatic programs (bots). Some of these bots are mimicking humans (socialbots) and can hardly be identified. In this article, we analyze a social botnet involved in the Ukrainian/Russian conflict. Based on text mining and unsupervised learning, we can identify three different behaviors: mimicry, window dressing, and reverberation.