Do Social Bots (Still) Act Different to Humans? - Comparing Metrics of Social Bots with Those of Humans

摘要

As a consequence of the growing relevance of social media and improved algorithms and techniques, social bots have become a widely recognized phenomenon. Social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse in social media in many ways (e.g. spreading spam or astroturfing). In this paper, we compare 771 social bots with 693 human accounts. Our analysis is based on a Twitter data set concerning the U.S. election in 2016. Our study shows that human Twitter users and bot accounts differ in many ways. E.g. we found differences regarding the number of follower and the retweets per day of an account, as well as between the used links per day and the retweets per day. Our findings are helpful to identify social bots and to get insights about the impact of social bots in public social media communication.