Do Social Bots Dream of Electric Sheep? A Categorisation of Social Media Bot Accounts
This work addresses the need for a shared understanding of social bots, which is crucial for researchers and policymakers dealing with bot influence in events like elections, though it is incremental as it builds on existing literature.
The paper tackled the problem of unclear definitions for 'social bots' on social media by conducting a systematic literature review and proposing a categorization scheme based on imitation of human behavior and intent.
So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the results of this literature review, we propose a scheme for categorising bot accounts on social media sites. Our scheme groups bot accounts by two dimensions - Imitation of human behaviour and Intent.