Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparatively analyse the usage and impact of bots and humans on Twitter, one of the largest OSNs in the world. We collect a large-scale Twitter dataset and define various metrics based on tweet metadata. We divide and filter the dataset in four popularity groups in terms of number of followers. Using a human annotation task we assign 'bot' and 'human' ground-truth labels to the dataset, and compare the annotations against an online bot detection tool for evaluation. We then ask a series of questions to discern important behavioural bot and human characteristics using metrics within and among four popularity groups. From the comparative analysis we draw important differences as well as surprising similarities between the two entities, thus paving the way for reliable classification of automated political infiltration, advertisement campaigns, and general bot detection.
Unlike these works, we do not aim to monitor the success of bot infiltration. Rather we are interested in understanding the behavioural differences of bots and humans. That said, there is work that has inspected bot or human behaviour in isolation. For example, @cite_6 examined the retweet behaviour of people, focussing on how people tweet , as well as why and what people retweet . The authors found that participants retweet using different styles, and for diverse reasons ( for others or for social action). This is relevant to our own work, as we also study retweets. In contrast, we directly compare retweet patterns of bots and humans (rather than just humans).
@cite_6
2001653897
Twitter - a microblogging service that enables users to post messages ("tweets") of up to 140 characters - supports a variety of communicative practices; participants use Twitter to converse with individuals, groups, and the public at large, so when conversations emerge, they are often experienced by broader audiences than just the interlocutors. This paper examines the practice of retweeting as a way by which participants can be "in a conversation." While retweeting has become a convention inside Twitter, participants retweet using different styles and for diverse reasons. We highlight how authorship, attribution, and communicative fidelity are negotiated in diverse ways. Using a series of case studies and empirical data, this paper maps out retweeting as a conversational practice.