A behavioural analysis of credulous Twitter users

Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific segments of the population. We have seen how false informat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Online social networks and media Vol. 23; p. 100133
Main Authors: Balestrucci, Alessandro, De Nicola, Rocco, Petrocchi, Marinella, Trubiani, Catia
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V 01.05.2021
Subjects:
Credulous users
Disinformation spreading
Features analysis
Online behavioural analysis
Twitter
Twitter
Features analysis
Online behavioural analysis
Disinformation spreading
Credulous users
ISSN:2468-6964, 2468-6964
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Thanks to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, people can know facts and events that otherwise would have been silenced. However, social media significantly contribute also to fast spreading biased and false news while targeting specific segments of the population. We have seen how false information can be spread using automated accounts, known as bots. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we investigate behavioural attitudes of so called ‘credulous’ users, i.e., genuine accounts following many bots. Leveraging our previous work, where supervised learning is successfully applied to single out credulous users, we improve the classification task with a detailed features’ analysis and provide evidence that simple and lightweight features are crucial to detect such users. Furthermore, we study the differences in the way credulous and not credulous users interact with bots and discover that credulous users tend to amplify more the content posted by bots and argue that their detection can be instrumental to get useful information on possible dissemination of spam content, propaganda, and, in general, little or no reliable information.
ISSN:2468-6964
2468-6964
DOI:10.1016/j.osnem.2021.100133