Tag: social botnet

Blogs and Bullets workshop at Stanford

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This past Friday (March 6, 2015) I participate in a workshop titled Blogs and Bullets and hosted by the PeaceTech Lab, George Washington University, and the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University.

I was honored to be participate and be part of the discussion on the use of Social Media analysis in research around Political and Natural crises. In my opinion, this is an important discussion to continue guiding the social computing and political research discourse to more rigors results and to benefit the users.

Thank you!

Our Paper to CSCW 2015 on Dissecting a Social Bot

Happy New Year! I hope your year is off to a great start…

I would like to share the great news that our paper “Dissecting a Social Botnet: Growth, Content and Influence in Twitter” got accepted at The 18th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2015) which will be held March 14-18, 2015 in Vancouver, Canada.

The paper focuses on one specific social botnet in Twitter to understand how it grows over time, how the content of tweets by the social botnet differ from regular users in the same dataset, and lastly, how the social botnet may have influenced the relevant discussions. Our analysis is based on a qualitative coding for approximately 3000 tweets in Arabic and English from the Syrian social bot that was active for 35 weeks on Twitter before it was shutdown. We find that the growth, behavior and content of this particular botnet did not specifically align with common conceptions of botnets. Further we identify interesting aspects of the botnet that distinguish it from regular users.

If you are attending CSCW 15 this year and you are interested in topics around social technical platforms and automated agents please plan to attend our presentation on Tuesday the 17th of March at 10am (More information on CSCW program page). If you are not planing on attending CSCW15 please feel free to download the paper from the ACM Library and read it. Our team welcomes your questions and comments, therefore don’t hesitate to contact us.

P.S. If you dont have access to ACM Library get in touch with me to provide you a copy.

The ACM citation is

Norah Abokhodair, Daisy Yoo, and David W. McDonald. 2015. Dissecting a Social Botnet: Growth, Content and Influence in Twitter. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 839-851. DOI=10.1145/2675133.2675208 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2675133.2675208

Thank you!