In the social media ecosystem, there is a great deal of interest in developing bots detection tools. Social bots are often used to generate content or disseminate fake opinions and sentiments. They can also disrupt public opinion and alter the stock market. Malicious bots include malicious retweeters, third-party scraping bots, and credential stuffing bots. These bots are often operated by a botmaster, but there are many others out there.
Bots can also be classified into two categories: good and bad bots. Good bots are those that perform repetitive tasks faster than humans. Bad bots are designed to hurt businesses. Examples of good bots are search engine bots and social media bots. Some researchers have even studied ways to predict victimship and classify automatically generated posts.
The best known approach to detect game bots is a neural network model. This method uses a multilayer perceptron neural network to identify and classify online smartphone game bots. However, the model cannot accurately detect gray area players. Grey area players have little data, making it difficult to differentiate between normal and abnormal players.
Behavioral analysis models can also be used to identify suspicious or abnormal behavior. These models can analyze normal visitor behavior over a long period of time to detect anomalies. But they can also miss gray area players. That is why researchers are interested in discovering more effective bots detection methods.
The study found that a fast and accurate approach requires an integrated system. It also used users-level data to estimate how often a player is abnormal. Generally, this process takes 180 estimates per every 15 minutes. Detecting social bots is a complicated process that requires an effective algorithm.
A recent study focused on Twitter users’ activity. It collected tweets from the users and analyzed their content. Using this block bots on website information, a multilayer perceptron neural networks model was developed to determine each player’s rate of abnormal behavior. Compared to a random forest algorithm, this model has a significantly higher performance.
In the last few years, efforts have been made to identify and combat malicious bots. Many researchers have developed algorithms to detect spam bots and to tame botnets. Research into the effects of bots in the social media space is only beginning. Unfortunately, detecting these bots still remains a major challenge. Efforts are also being made to arm legitimate users against bots.
Although many research studies have been conducted, most of them are based on Twitter. There are also several other popular micro-blogging platforms. Researchers have a need for accurate and effective bot detection tools that can easily be implemented in their systems. As the number of users grows and more malicious actors take to the web, it is important to develop reliable, easy-to-use tools.
Currently, there are three approaches to detecting social bots. One method is a deep learning algorithm, the other is a supervised machine learning approach, and the third is a joint content feature extraction layer that focuses on determining the relationship between tweets.