How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09613v2
• Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2025 09:37:38 GMT
• Title: How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis
• Authors: Herun Wan, Minnan Luo, Zihan Ma, Guang Dai, Xiang Zhao,
• Abstract summary: This paper is the first to explore the interplay between social bots and misinformation on the Sina Weibo platform.<n>From the misinformation perspective, this dataset is multimodal, containing 11,393 pieces of misinformation and 16,416 pieces of real information.<n>From the social bot perspective, this dataset contains 65,749 social bots and 345,886 genuine accounts.
• Score: 17.53279395036265
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The social media platform is an ideal medium to spread misinformation, where social bots might accelerate the spread. This paper is the first to explore the interplay between social bots and misinformation on the Sina Weibo platform. We construct a large-scale dataset that contains annotations of misinformation and social bots. From the misinformation perspective, this dataset is multimodal, containing 11,393 pieces of misinformation and 16,416 pieces of real information. From the social bot perspective, this dataset contains 65,749 social bots and 345,886 genuine accounts, where we propose a weak-supervised annotator to annotate automatically. Extensive experiments prove that the dataset is the most comprehensive, misinformation and real information are distinguishable, and social bots have high annotation quality. Further analysis illustrates that: (i) social bots are deeply involved in information spread; (ii) misinformation with the same topics has similar content, providing the basis of echo chambers, and social bots amplify this phenomenon; and (iii) social bots generate similar content aiming to manipulate public opinions.

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