Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON DEPENDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING
Volume 9, Issue 6, Pages 811-824Publisher
IEEE COMPUTER SOC
DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2012.75
Keywords
Automatic identification; bot; cyborg; Twitter; social networks
Categories
Funding
- ARO [W911NF-11-1-0149]
- US National Science Foundation (NSF) [0901537]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research [FA9550-09-1-0421]
- Army Research Office under MURI [W911NF-09-1-0525]
- Army Research Office under DURIP [W911NF-11-1-0340]
- Div Of Electrical, Commun & Cyber Sys
- Directorate For Engineering [0901537] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Twitter is a new web application playing dual roles of online social networking and microblogging. Users communicate with each other by publishing text-based posts. The popularity and open structure of Twitter have attracted a large number of automated programs, known as bots, which appear to be a double-edged sword to Twitter. Legitimate bots generate a large amount of benign tweets delivering news and updating feeds, while malicious bots spread spam or malicious contents. More interestingly, in the middle between human and bot, there has emerged cyborg referred to either bot-assisted human or human-assisted bot. To assist human users in identifying who they are interacting with, this paper focuses on the classification of human, bot, and cyborg accounts on Twitter. We first conduct a set of large-scale measurements with a collection of over 500,000 accounts. We observe the difference among human, bot, and cyborg in terms of tweeting behavior, tweet content, and account properties. Based on the measurement results, we propose a classification system that includes the following four parts: 1) an entropy-based component, 2) a spam detection component, 3) an account properties component, and 4) a decision maker. It uses the combination of features extracted from an unknown user to determine the likelihood of being a human, bot, or cyborg. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed classification system.
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