Taming Social Bots: Detection, Exploration and Measurement

Social bots have been around for over a decade since 2008. Social bots are capable of swaying political opinion, spreading false information, and recruiting for terrorist organizations. Social bots use various sophisticated techniques by adopting emotions, sympathy following, synchronous deletions, and profile molting. There are several approaches proposed in the literature for detection, exploration, and measuring social bots. We provide a comprehensive overview of the existing work from data mining and machine learning perspective, discuss relative strengths and weaknesses of various methods, make recommendations for researchers and practitioners, and propose novel directions for future research in taming the social bots. The tutorial also discusses pitfalls in collecting and sharing data on social bots.