Identify social bots presence and coordinated efforts to manipulate online public opinion on social media platforms

Project Summary

Social networks constitute one of the major venues for massive information sharing and their popularity renders them one of the most impactful means to form or shift public opinion. Recently, a great raise of ill-motivated Social Bots, has been witnessed aiming to manipulate community sentiment. Social bots nowadays constitute coordinated armies controlled by malefactors who aim to manipulate and deceive media users. While social media enable the reproducibility of fake news or misleading information over the web, Social Bots take care of amplifying their popularity and catch social community’s eye though crafted viral trends. Social bots are leveraged in order to manipulate the market by forming trends in favour (or against) products/services and brands’ reputation [1], while it is believed that they have played an important role in election periods by spoiling (or benefiting) the political profile of candidates. To this end, the endeavour of finding, validating and sharing the truth in the 5G era implies the detection of those coordinated nodes, understanding their motivation and revealing the main influencer actor.

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