Detecting Automation of Twitter Accounts: Are You a Human, Bot, or Cyborg?

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…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• UO
  University of Oregon
• MU
  Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative
• AF
  Air Force Office of Scientific Research
• AR
  Army Research Office