"Who's a Bot and Who's Not"

Social media bots are social media accounts that use artificial intelligence to automate the performance of activities such as aggregating news, assisting customers for online retailers, and more. They are also used to amplify the spread of misinformation and shape public opinion. Since these bots continue to improve at mimicking human behavior, it is getting increasingly harder for them to be detected. Much research on social media bots has focussed on bot detection rather than bot characteristics and behavior in comparison to that of humans. A new study examined the behavior of bots and humans throughout an activity session using a Twitter dataset correlated with recent political developments. The results from this analysis were used to inform a classification system for bot detection. The researchers looked at tweet length, replies, mentions, amount of tweets, and other indicators of the quantity and quality of a users' social interactions to capture differences in behavior between bots and humans. One trend present in humans that were not present among bots is tiredness, which was shown by the decrease in humans' production of content and illustrated by the decline in the average tweet length as sessions progressed. This article continues to discuss the concept of social media bots, the growing advancement of bots, and findings from the study aimed at examining the differences in behavior between bots and humans to improve bot detection. 

Science Daily reports "Who's a Bot and Who's Not"