A first-principles definition of a social media bot -- an automated account carrying out mechanics for content creation, distribution and collection, and/or relationship formation and dissolution -- used as the premise for a large-scale empirical comparison of bot versus human behavior across ~200 million users and 7 global events. Establishes that bots and humans differ systematically along chatter volume (~20% vs 80%), linguistic cues (automatable signals like hashtags and positive terms versus dialogue-dependent threaded replies), identity alignment (bot word-categories match presented identity while human messages often do not), and interaction-network structure (star for bots, hierarchical for humans), and frames three open challenges: Detect, Differentiate, Disrupt.
Empirical social-cybersecurity study that first derives a first-principles definition of a social media bot ('an automated account that carries out a series of mechanics on social media platforms for…