Study reveals behavioral differences between bots and humans that could inform new machine learning algorithms

Bots are social media accounts which are controlled by artificial software rather than by humans and serve a variety of purposes from news aggregation to automated customer assistance for online retailers. However, bots have recently been under the spotlight as they are regularly employed as part of large-scale efforts on social media to manipulate public opinion, such as during electoral campaigns. A new study in Frontiers in Physics has revealed the presence of short-term behavioral trends in humans that are absent in social media bots, providing an example of a'human signature' on social media which could be leveraged to develop more sophisticated bot detection strategies. The research is the first study of its kind to apply user behavior over a social media session to the problem of bot detection. "Remarkably, bots continuously improve to mimic more and more of the behavior humans typically exhibit on social media. Every time we identify a characteristic we think is prerogative of human behavior, such as sentiment of topics of interest, we soon discover that newly-developed open-source bots can now capture those aspects," says co-author Emilio Ferrara, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Research Team Leader at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.