Abstract
The openness feature of Twitter allows programs to generate and control Twitter accounts automatically via the Twitter API. These accounts, which are known as “bots”, can automatically perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts, just like real people. They can also conduct malicious tasks such as spreading of fake news, spams, malicious software and other cyber-crimes. In this paper, we introduce a novel bot detection approach using deep learning, with the Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Networks and nine features of a bot account. A web crawler is developed to automatically collect data from public Twitter accounts and build the testing and training datasets, with 860 samples of human and bot accounts. After the initial training is done, the Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Networks achieved an overall accuracy rate of 92%, which proves the performance of the proposed approach.
Cyber-Trust Project 2020.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Blog, H.: General twitter stats. https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/. Accessed 19 Oct 2019
Brunner, M., Palmer, S., Togher, L., Dann, S., Hemsley, B.: Content analysis of tweets by people with traumatic brain injury (TBI): implications for rehabilitation and social media goals. In: Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2019)
Chu, Z., Gianvecchio, S., Wang, H., Jajodia, S.: Who is tweeting on twitter: human, bot, or cyborg? In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 21–30. ACM (2010)
Chu, Z., Gianvecchio, S., Wang, H., Jajodia, S.: Detecting automation of twitter accounts: are you a human, bot, or cyborg? IEEE Trans. Dependable Secure Comput. 9(6), 811–824 (2012)
Daniel, F., Cappiello, C., Benatallah, B.: Bots acting like humans: understanding and preventing harm. IEEE Internet Comput. 23(2), 40–49 (2019)
Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., Flammini, A.: The rise of social bots. Commun. ACM 59(7), 96–104 (2016)
Gong, F., Ma, Y., Gong, W., Li, X., Li, C., Yuan, X.: Neo4j graph database realizes efficient storage performance of oilfield ontology. PLoS ONE 13(11), e0207595 (2018)
Kudugunta, S., Ferrara, E.: Deep neural networks for bot detection. Inf. Sci. 467, 312–322 (2018)
Lin, P.C., Huang, P.M.: A study of effective features for detecting long-surviving twitter spam accounts. In: 2013 15th International Conference on Advanced Communications Technology (ICACT), pp. 841–846. IEEE (2013)
Margolin, D.B., Hannak, A., Weber, I.: Political fact-checking on twitter: when do corrections have an effect? Political Commun. 35(2), 196–219 (2018)
Moorley, C.R., Chinn, T.: Nursing and twitter: creating an online community using hashtags. Collegian 21(2), 103–109 (2014)
Newberg, M.: As many as 48 million twitter accounts aren’t people says study. https://www.cnbc.com/michael-newberg/. Accessed 12 Dec 2019
Pozzana, I., Ferrara, E.: Measuring bot and human behavioral dynamics. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04286 (2018)
Sendible: Twitter hashtags: Guide to finding and using the right ones. https://www.sendible.com/insights/twitter-hashtags. Accessed 19 Oct 2019
Song, J., Lee, S., Kim, J.: Spam filtering in twitter using sender-receiver relationship. In: Sommer, R., Balzarotti, D., Maier, G. (eds.) RAID 2011. LNCS, vol. 6961, pp. 301–317. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23644-0_16
Trinius, P., Holz, T., Göbel, J., Freiling, F.C.: Visual analysis of malware behavior using treemaps and thread graphs. In: 2009 6th International Workshop on Visualization for Cyber Security, pp. 33–38. IEEE (2009)
Wang, A.H.: Detecting spam bots in online social networking sites: a machine learning approach. In: Foresti, S., Jajodia, S. (eds.) DBSec 2010. LNCS, vol. 6166, pp. 335–342. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13739-6_25
Wright, J., Engineer, P.R., Anise, O., et al.: Don’t@ me: Hunting twitterbots at scale. Blackhat USA 2018 (2018)
Acknowledgment
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 786698. The work reflects only the authors’ view and the Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Braker, C., Shiaeles, S., Bendiab, G., Savage, N., Limniotis, K. (2020). BotSpot: Deep Learning Classification of Bot Accounts Within Twitter. In: Galinina, O., Andreev, S., Balandin, S., Koucheryavy, Y. (eds) Internet of Things, Smart Spaces, and Next Generation Networks and Systems. NEW2AN ruSMART 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12525. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65726-0_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65726-0_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-65725-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-65726-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)