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arXiv · 1809.06190

A Network Topology Approach to Bot Classification

Laurenz A Cornelissen·Richard J Barnett·Petrus Schoonwinkel·Brent D. Eichstadt·Hluma B. Magodla
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Abstract

Automated social agents, or bots, are increasingly becoming a problem on social media platforms. There is a growing body of literature and multiple tools to aid in the detection of such agents on online social networking platforms. We propose that the social network topology of a user would be sufficient to determine whether the user is a automated agent or a human. To test this, we use a publicly available dataset containing users on Twitter labelled as either automated social agent or human. Using an unsupervised machine learning approach, we obtain a detection accuracy rate of 70%.

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Laurenz A Cornelissen, Richard J Barnett, Petrus Schoonwinkel, Brent D. Eichstadt, Hluma B. Magodla. 2018-09-17. A Network Topology Approach to Bot Classification. https://doi.org/10.1145/3278681.3278692

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