Real-Time Bot Detection from Twitter Using the Twitterbot+ Framework

Kheir Eddine Daouadi (Sfax University, Tunisia)

Rim Zghal Rebaï (Sfax University, Tunisia)

Ikram Amous (Sfax University, Tunisia)

Abstract: Nowadays, bot detection from Twitter attracts the attention of several researchers around the world. Different bot detection approaches have been proposed as a result of these research efforts. Four of the main challenges faced in this context are the diversity of types of content propagated throughout Twitter, the problem inherent to the text, the lack of sufficient labeled datasets and the fact that the current bot detection approaches are not sufficient to detect bot activities accurately. We propose, Twitterbot+, a bot detection system that leveraged a minimal number of language-independent features extracted from one single tweet with temporal enrichment of a previously labeled datasets. We conducted experiments on three benchmark datasets with standard evaluation scenarios, and the achieved results demonstrate the efficiency of Twitterbot+ against the state-of-the-art. This yielded a promising accuracy results (>95%). Our proposition is suitable for accurate and real-time use in a Twitter data collection step as an initial filtering technique to improve the quality of research data.

Keywords: Twitter bot detection, Twitterbot+, content-based approach, hybrid-based approach, statistical-based approach, temporal enrichment

Categories: H.3.1, H.3.2, H.3.3, H.3.7, H.5.1