Over the past few years, extensive anecdotal evidence emerged that suggests the involvement of state-sponsored actors (or "trolls") in online political campaigns with the goal to manipulate public opinion and sow discord. Recently, Twitter and Reddit released ground truth data about Russian and Iranian state-sponsored actors that were active on their platforms. In this paper, we analyze these ground truth datasets across several axes to understand how these actors operate, how they evolve over time, who are their targets, how their strategies changed over time, and what is their influence to the Web's information ecosystem. Among other things we find: a) campaigns of these actors were influenced by real-world events; b) these actors were employing different tactics and had different targets over time, thus their automated detection is not straightforward; and c) Russian trolls were clearly pro-Trump, whereas Iranian trolls were anti-Trump. Finally, using Hawkes Processes, we quantified the influence that these actors had to four Web communities: Reddit, Twitter, 4chan's Politically Incorrect board ( pol ), and Gab, finding that Russian trolls were more influential than Iranians with the exception of pol .
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the alleged use of trolls by Russia to spread malicious content in Western elections. This paper examines the Russian interference campaign in the 2016 US presidential election on Twitter. Our aim is twofold: first, we test whether predicting users who spread trolls' content is feasible in order to gain insight on how to contain their influence in the future; second, we identify features that are most predictive of users who either intentionally or unintentionally play a vital role in spreading this malicious content. We collected a dataset with over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between September 16 and November 9, 2016, by about 5.7 million users. This dataset includes accounts associated with the Russian trolls identified by the US Congress. Proposed models are able to very accurately identify users who spread the trolls' content (average AUC score of 96 , using 10-fold validation). We show that political ideology, bot likelihood scores, and some activity-related account meta data are the most predictive features of whether a user spreads trolls' content or not. One of the key aspects of the United States democracy is free and fair elections that allow for a peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next. The 2016 US presidential election stands out due to suspected foreign influence before, during, and after the election. A significant portion of that suspected influence was carried out via social media. In this paper, we look specifically at 3,500 Facebook ads allegedly purchased by the Russian government. These ads were released on May 10, 2018 by the US Congress House Intelligence Committee. We analyzed the ads using natural language processing techniques to determine textual and semantic features associated with the most effective ones. We clustered the ads over time into the various campaigns and the labeled parties associated with them. We also studied the effectiveness of Ads on an individual, campaign and party basis. The most effective ads tend to have less positive sentiment, focus on past events and are more specific and personalized in nature. The more effective campaigns also show such similar characteristics. The campaigns' duration and promotion of the Ads suggest a desire to sow division rather than sway the election. 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. Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a thousand features extracted from public data and meta-data about users: friends, tweet content and sentiment, network patterns, and activity time series. We benchmark the classification framework by using a publicly available dataset of Twitter bots. This training data is enriched by a manually annotated collection of active Twitter users that include both humans and bots of varying sophistication. Our models yield high accuracy and agreement with each other and can detect bots of different nature. Our estimates suggest that between 9 and 15 of active Twitter accounts are bots. Characterizing ties among accounts, we observe that simple bots tend to interact with bots that exhibit more human-like behaviors. Analysis of content flows reveals retweet and mention strategies adopted by bots to interact with different target groups. Using clustering analysis, we characterize several subclasses of accounts, including spammers, self promoters, and accounts that post content from connected applications.  Today's social bots are sophisticated and sometimes menacing. Indeed, their presence can endanger online ecosystems as well as our society. Social media have been extensively praised for increasing democratic discussion on social issues related to policy and politics. However, what happens when this powerful communication tools are exploited to manipulate online discussion, to change the public perception of political entities, or even to try affecting the outcome of political elections? In this study we investigated how the presence of social media bots, algorithmically driven entities that on the surface appear as legitimate users, affect political discussion around the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. By leveraging state-of-the-art social bot detection algorithms, we uncovered a large fraction of user population that may not be human, accounting for a significant portion of generated content (about one-fifth of the entire conversation). We inferred political partisanships from hashtag adoption, for both humans and bots, and studied spatio-temporal communication, political support dynamics, and influence mechanisms by discovering the level of network embeddedness of the bots. Our findings suggest that the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it, which in turn can potentially alter public opinion and endanger the integrity of the Presidential election. While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate discussions, alter the popularity of users, pollute content and spread misinformation, and even perform terrorist propaganda and recruitment actions. Here we present BotOrNot, a publicly-available service that leverages more than one thousand features to evaluate the extent to which a Twitter account exhibits similarity to the known characteristics of social bots. Since its release in May 2014, BotOrNot has served over one million requests via our website and APIs. Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been coordinated by means of bots, social media accounts controlled by computer scripts that try to disguise themselves as legitimate human users. In this study, we describe one such operation that occurred in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election. We collected a massive Twitter dataset of nearly 17 million posts, posted between 27 April and 7 May 2017 (Election Day). We then set to study the MacronLeaks disinformation campaign: By leveraging a mix of machine learning and cognitive behavioral modeling techniques, we separated humans from bots, and then studied the activities of the two groups independently, as well as their interplay. We provide a characterization of both the bots and the users who engaged with them, and oppose it to those users who didn’t. Prior interests of disinformation adopters pinpoint to the reasons of scarce success of this campaign: the users who engaged with MacronLeaks are mostly foreigners with pre-existing interest in alt-right topics and alternative news media, rather than French users with diverse political views. Concluding, anomalous account usage patterns suggest the possible existence of a black market for reusable political disinformation bots.