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Inside the Tool Set of Automation: Free Social Bot Code Revisited

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12021))

Abstract

Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such automated programs, it is still unclear how technically sophisticated those bots are, which platforms they target, and where they originate from. To answer these questions, we gathered repository data from open source collaboration platforms to identify the status-quo of social bot development as well as first insights into the overall skills of publicly available bot code.

The authors acknowledge support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 16KIS0495K) and the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) as well as the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    e.g. BotWiki https://botwiki.org/resources/twitterbots/, Fredheim http://quantifyingmemory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/putins-bots-part-one-bit-about-bots.html, Grossmann https://medium.freecodecamp.org/my-open-source-instagram-bot-got-me-2-500-real-followers-for-5-in-server-costs-e40491358340.

  2. 2.

    e.g. https://github.com/eggheads/eggdrop/, https://dev.botframework.com/.

  3. 3.

    see: Alexa Rank: https://www.alexa.com/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.elastic.co.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Leonardo-Campus 3, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Dennis Assenmacher, Lena Adam, Heike Trautmann & Christian Grimme

  2. Department of Communication, University of Münster, Bispinghof 9-14, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Lena Frischlich

Authors
  1. Dennis Assenmacher
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  2. Lena Adam
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  3. Lena Frischlich
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  4. Heike Trautmann
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  5. Christian Grimme
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christian Grimme .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, WWU Münster, Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Christian Grimme

  2. LIACS, Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Mike Preuss

  3. LIACS, Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Frank W. Takes

  4. Department of Communication, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Annie Waldherr

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Assenmacher, D., Adam, L., Frischlich, L., Trautmann, H., Grimme, C. (2020). Inside the Tool Set of Automation: Free Social Bot Code Revisited. In: Grimme, C., Preuss, M., Takes, F., Waldherr, A. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12021. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39627-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39627-5_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39626-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39627-5

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