Publication Date
1-1-2022
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Title
Communications in Computer and Information Science
Volume
1683 CCIS
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-24049-2_3
First Page
38
Last Page
54
Abstract
Online Social Networks (OSNs) have grown exponentially in terms of active users and have now become an influential factor in the formation of public opinions. For this reason, the use of bots and botnets for spreading misinformation on OSNs has become a widespread concern. Identifying bots and botnets on Twitter can require complex statistical methods to score a profile based on multiple features. Benford’s Law, or the Law of Anomalous Numbers, states that, in any naturally occurring sequence of numbers, the First Significant Leading Digit (FSLD) frequency follows a particular pattern such that they are unevenly distributed and reducing. This principle can be applied to the first-degree egocentric network of a Twitter profile to assess its conformity to such law and, thus, classify it as a bot profile or normal profile. This paper focuses on leveraging Benford’s Law in combination with various Machine Learning (ML) classifiers to identify bot profiles on Twitter. In addition, a comparison with other statistical methods is produced to confirm our classification results.
Keywords
Benford’s law, Machine learning, Social bots, Social networks, Twitter
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Computer Science
Recommended Citation
Sanmesh Bhosale and Fabio Di Troia. "Twitter Bots’ Detection with Benford’s Law and Machine Learning" Communications in Computer and Information Science (2022): 38-54. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24049-2_3
