Social Bot Detection

Latest papers

12 papers1 paper in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 1, 2026

Social bot detection in the age of ChatGPT: Challenges and opportunities

We present a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities in social bot detection in the context of the rise of sophisticated AI-based chatbots. By examining the state of the art in social bot detection techniques and the more salient real-world application to date, we identify gaps and emerging trends in the field, with a focus on addressing the unique challenges posed by AI-generated conversations and behaviors. We suggest potentially promising opportunities and research directions in social bot detection, including (i) the use of generative agents for synthetic data generation, testing and evaluation; (ii) the need for multimodal and cross-platform detection based on network and behavioral signatures of coordination and influence; (iii) the opportunity to extend bot detection to non-English and low-resource language settings; and, (iv) the room for development of collaborative, federated learning detection models that can help facilitate cooperation between different organizations and platforms while preserving user privacy.

Emilio Ferrara

Social Bot Detection Social Media Analysis AI-Generated Text Detection

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Sep 20, 2026

CSC: Calibrated Simplicity for Conflict-Aware Social Bot Detection in the LLM Era

Social bot detection is essential for protecting online platforms from misinformation amplification, coordinated manipulation, and distorted public discourse. However, large language models have made social bots much harder to detect from text alone because semantic camouflage is now cheap, fluent, and scalable. The resulting challenge is modality conflict: an account may look human-like in semantics while remaining suspicious in graph structure, profile attributes, or cross-modal consistency. Recent graph-based detectors tackle this limitation by adding graph-side complexity, such as sparse prototype selection, adaptive gating, or architecture-specific control logic, yet our experiments suggest that complexity alone is not the most reliable way to resolve such conflict. We therefore propose CSC, a calibrated-simplicity framework for conflict-aware LLM-era social bot detection. The framework combines three design choices: a simplified prototype-guided graph expert that retains useful structural biases while removing unstable graph-side heuristics, calibrated simplex-constrained fusion that aligns heterogeneous confidence spaces before late fusion, and a lightweight inconsistency expert that models cross-modal disagreement. Experiments on TwiBot-22, TwiBot-20, and MGStBot-large show that CSC improves calibrated operating-point decision quality while remaining competitive across external benchmarks. Further analyses show that calibration improves confidence reliability, the inconsistency expert mainly provides localized corrections in high-conflict or near-threshold regions, and simplified graph-side control yields a better stability-cost trade-off. A targeted semantic-camouflage stress test further shows that replacing selected bot text with matched human text sharply degrades the standalone text expert while leaving graph and fused evidence stable on a balanced challenge set.

Yipeng Qian, Pengjie Zhao, Chaoxi Niu

Minzu University of China Beijing, China · City University of Macau Macau, China

Social Media Analysis Probability Calibration Multimodal Fusion Social Bot Detection

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Aug 16, 2026

Breaking and Defending LLM-Powered Social Media Bot Detection Systems

The rise of social media bots poses a persistent threat, enabling misinformation, opinion manipulation, and the erosion of trust in online platforms. To combat this, machine learning systems have been developed to detect and limit bot activity, but attackers continuously adapt through techniques such as adversarial learning and behavior imitation, fueling an ongoing arms race between bots and detection tools. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved bot detection by enabling deeper semantic and contextual analysis of accounts and their content. However, this shift also introduces new attack surfaces, allowing adversaries to craft exploits that directly target the reasoning and generation mechanisms of LLM-based classifiers. Industry tools such as Anthropic's Claude Code Security similarly leverage LLMs for security-critical decisions, further motivating a careful study of their attack surfaces. In this work, we investigate both the offensive and defensive aspects of LLM-powered, threat-specific cybersecurity applications. While centered on the challenge of social media bot detection, our methodology and insights generalize to a broad class of LLM-powered cybersecurity systems, including phishing detection, email classification, and fraud analysis. We introduce two novel adversarial attack strategies that systematically exploit the semantic and contextual weaknesses of LLM-based classifiers, degrading their detection accuracy by up to 48%. To counter these threats, we propose a robust multi-LLM defense architecture designed to preserve detection reliability under adaptive adversarial conditions. Our solution, LSABRE (LLM-powered Social Adversarial Bot Recognition Ensemble), is a multi-LLM framework that substantially improves robustness across a range of attacks, maintaining 86% detection accuracy even under strong, adaptive adversarial pressure.

Nof Orenstein, Yoni Birman

Department of Computer Science Reichman University Herzliya, Israel

Social Bot Detection LLM Security Adversarial Robustness of Language Models Adversarial Attacks on LLMs Social Media Analysis

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Aug 14, 2026

FISSION: Label Augmentation for Bot Detection

Bot accounts and coordinated influence operations are often discovered via heuristic methods, leaving a dearth of reliable ground-truth labels for training detection systems. To address this challenge, we study a natural question: can we generate labels to assist in learning embeddings in which bots and accounts from the same coordinated operation are close? We present FISSION, a method to generate labels by splitting each account's activity into positively labeled sub-accounts. Given this label source, we train detection models which preserve behavioral regularities recurring across positive sub-accounts. We evaluate FISSION and show it outperforms prior methods in detecting Wikipedia sockpuppets and Twitter/X bots.

Sen Yang, Ignacy Nieweglowski, Aviv Yaish

Yale University, IC3 · Staples High School

Social Bot Detection Data Augmentation

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Jul 21, 2026

Broken Gates: Re-evaluating Web Bot Defenses in the Age of LLM Agents

LLM-based browser agents are rapidly changing the threat landscape for web security. Unlike traditional automation frameworks that execute predefined scripts, these agents can autonomously navigate websites, reason about page content, and interact with web interfaces using natural-language instructions. This evolution raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of bot management systems, widely deployed to defend against automated web abuse. In this paper, we present a systematic measurement study evaluating the resilience of both interactive challenge-based defenses and non-interactive trust-based defenses against two attacker classes: commercial Captcha-solving services and LLM-based browser agents. Our evaluation spans seven solver services and six agents, including cloud-hosted, self-hosted, AI-assisted, and browser-extension configurations, tested against hCaptcha, reCaptcha v2, reCaptcha v3, and Cloudflare Turnstile. Our results show that challenge-based defenses are broadly ineffective against commercial solvers, which achieve near-perfect bypass at negligible cost. The challenges can similarly be defeated by LLM-based agents when a dedicated solver module is available. Non-interactive defenses such as reCaptcha v3 exhibit stronger resistance, but our analysis reveals that this resilience does not reflect a fundamental security property. Through fine-grained interaction trace analysis, we find that two agents with nearly indistinguishable behavioral footprints yield divergent outcomes, one bypassing the defense and one failing, isolating execution-environment authenticity, rather than agent behavior, as the determining factor. These findings suggest that the security boundary of non-interactive defenses lies at the environment layer, with significant implications for how bot management systems are designed and evaluated.

Behzad Ousat, Nikita Turkmen, Lalchandra Rampersaud +2

Florida International University

LLM Agent Security Web Agents Social Bot Detection

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Jun 5, 2026

Adversarial Creation and Detection of AI-Generated Social Bot Content

The convergence of large language models and social bots allows malicious actors to manipulate the information ecosystem by generating human-like content at scale. Existing models for detecting AI-generated content often fail in the wild, primarily due to the lack of ground-truth data. We address this gap through an adversarial methodology that models the impersonation of real social media users by malicious actors. Using this methodology, we curate a multilingual, cross-platform dataset of paired human and AI-generated messages. Training on such adversarial data yields accurate detection of AI-generated text. Our approach significantly outperforms existing models for content-based bot detection in real-world, out-of-distribution data.

Mykola Trokhymovych, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Alessandro Flammini +2

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain · Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA · KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

AI-Generated Text Detection Multilingual Text Classification Text Classification Social Bot Detection

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May 28, 2026

SAHG: Sector-Anisotropic Hyperbolic Graph Model for Social Bot Detection

LLM-driven social bots can generate fluent, human-like text, reducing the discriminative advantage of content-based detection alone. However, coordinated campaigns still leave relational patterns -- interactions, behavioral similarity, shared neighborhoods, community positions, and coordinated activity -- that graph-based methods can exploit. Existing graph detectors face two challenges when exploiting such evidence. First, Euclidean GNNs distort hierarchical and scale-free social graphs; while hyperbolic geometry addresses this volume-growth mismatch, fixed-curvature models still assign uniform geometric resolution to structural directions with different densities and separation needs. Second, relational evidence is not always reliable: sophisticated bots forge heterophilic connections with genuine users, causing neighborhood aggregation to mix bot and human signals and dilute account-level evidence. We propose SAHG (Sector-Anisotropic Hyperbolic Graph), addressing both challenges. SAHG learns a direction-dependent curvature field

γ(u)

that adapts geometric resolution across structural directions, and uses sector prototypes to convert angular concentration and alignment into classifier-readable features. To prevent contaminated aggregation from overwhelming account-level evidence, SAHG encodes per-account features and graph-neighborhood representations in two independent SAH channels, fusing them only at the classifier. Experiments on Fox8-23, BotSim-24, and MGTAB show that SAHG achieves the highest accuracy and F1 on all three benchmarks, outperforming feature-based, graph-based, LLM-based, and isotropic hyperbolic baselines. Ablation and geometric analyses confirm the effectiveness of the anisotropic geometry and dual-channel design.

Hanning Lu, Yingguang Yang, Jinwei Su +8

University of Leeds · University of Science and Technology of China · 3South China Normal University +6

Social Media Analysis Graph Neural Networks Hyperbolic Representation Learning Social Bot Detection

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Apr 12, 2026

FedRio: Personalized Federated Social Bot Detection via Cooperative Reinforced Contrastive Adversarial Distillation

Social bot detection is critical to the stability and security of online social platforms. However, current state-of-the-art bot detection models are largely developed in isolation, overlooking the benefits of leveraging shared detection patterns across platforms to improve performance and promptly identify emerging bot variants. The heterogeneity of data distributions and model architectures further complicates the design of an effective cross-platform and cross-model detection framework. To address these challenges, we propose FedRio (Personalized Federated Social Bot Detection with Cooperative Reinforced Contrastive Adversarial Distillation framework. We first introduce an adaptive message-passing module as the graph neural network backbone for each client. To facilitate efficient knowledge sharing of global data distributions, we design a federated knowledge extraction mechanism based on generative adversarial networks. Additionally, we employ a multi-stage adversarial contrastive learning strategy to enforce feature space consistency among clients and reduce divergence between local and global models. Finally, we adopt adaptive server-side parameter aggregation and reinforcement learning-based client-side parameter control to better accommodate data heterogeneity in heterogeneous federated settings. Extensive experiments on two real-world social bot detection benchmarks demonstrate that FedRio consistently outperforms state-of-the-art federated learning baselines in detection accuracy, communication efficiency, and feature space consistency, while remaining competitive with published centralized results under substantially stronger privacy constraints.

Yingguang Yang, Hao Liu, Xin Zhang +8

School of Cyber science at University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China · State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China · Institute of Data Science at the National University of Singapore, 119077, Singapore +4

Social Bot Detection Federated Learning Federated Knowledge Distillation Heterogeneous Federated Learning Adversarial Knowledge Distillation

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Apr 2, 2026

TRACE-Bot: Detecting Emerging LLM-Driven Social Bots via Implicit Semantic Representations and AIGC-Enhanced Behavioral Patterns

Large Language Model-driven (LLM-driven) social bots pose a growing threat to online discourse by generating human-like content that evades conventional detection. Existing methods suffer from limited detection accuracy due to overreliance on single-modality signals, insufficient sensitivity to the specific generative patterns of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC), and a failure to adequately model the interplay between linguistic patterns and behavioral dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose TRACE-Bot, a unified dual-channel framework that jointly models implicit semantic representations and AIGC-enhanced behavioral patterns. TRACE-Bot constructs fine-grained representations from heterogeneous sources, including personal information data, interaction behavior data and tweet data. A dual-channel architecture captures linguistic representations via a pretrained language model and behavioral irregularities via multidimensional activity features augmented with signals from state-of-the-art (SOTA) AIGC detectors. The fused representations are then classified through a lightweight prediction head. Experiments on two public LLM-driven social bot datasets demonstrate SOTA performance, achieving accuracies of 98.46% and 97.50%, respectively. The results further indicate strong robustness against advanced bot strategies, highlighting the effectiveness of jointly leveraging implicit semantic representations and AIGC-enhanced behavioral patterns for emerging LLM-driven social bot detection.

Zhongbo Wang, Zhiyu Lin, Zhu Wang +1

School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Sichuan 610207, China · School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing 102600, China · College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Sichuan 610065, China +1

Social Bot Detection LLM Security

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Mar 31, 2026

Beyond Individual Mimicry: Constructing Human-Like Social network with Graph-Augmented LLM Agents

Driven by large language models (LLMs), social bot can autonomously engage in local interactions, whose human-like behaviors enable them to evade social bot detection. However, while these botnets exhibit realistic local social interactions, they fail to preserve human-like social network. This is because LLM-based bots are graph-unaware and cannot coordinate over global interactions, which makes those botnets vulnerable to graph neural network (GNN)-based detection. To address this limitation, we propose GraphMind, which equips LLM-driven social bots to explicitly learn and fit human-like social network structures. Building on this foundation, we further construct GraphMind-Botnet, a LLM-driven botnet designed to evaluate the performance of existing social bot detection algorithms. Experiments on datasets derived from GraphMind-Botnet show that both text-based and graph-based detection models show substantially degraded performance in distinguishing. Our results highlight the critical role of social link construction in LLM-driven social network generation, while exposing fundamental weaknesses in existing bot detection mechanisms.

Haoran Bu, Litian Zhang, Chuxuan Zhang +3

Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Social Bot Detection Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation Synthetic Data Generation

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Mar 16, 2026

POLAR:A Per-User Association Test in Embedding Space

Most intrinsic association probes operate at the word, sentence, or corpus level, obscuring author-level variation. We present POLAR (Per-user On-axis Lexical Association Re-port), a per-user lexical association test that runs in the embedding space of a lightly adapted masked language model. Authors are represented by private deterministic to-kens; POLAR projects these vectors onto curated lexicalaxes and reports standardized effects with permutation p-values and Benjamini--Hochberg control. On a balanced bot--human Twitter benchmark, POLAR cleanly separates LLM-driven bots from organic accounts; on an extremist forum,it quantifies strong alignment with slur lexicons and reveals rightward drift over time. The method is modular to new attribute sets and provides concise, per-author diagnostics for computational social science. All code is publicly avail-able at https://github.com/pedroaugtb/POLAR-A-Per-User-Association-Test-in-Embedding-Space.

Pedro Bento, Arthur Buzelin, Arthur Chagas +7

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Social Bot Detection Social Media Analysis

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Feb 25, 2026

RABot: Reinforcement-Guided Graph Augmentation for Imbalanced and Noisy Social Bot Detection

Social bot detection is pivotal for safeguarding the integrity of online information ecosystems. Although recent graph neural network (GNN) solutions achieve strong results, they remain hindered by two practical challenges: (i) severe class imbalance arising from the high cost of generating bots, and (ii) topological noise introduced by bots that skillfully mimic human behavior and forge deceptive links. We propose the Reinforcement-guided graph Augmentation social Bot detector (RABot), a multi-granularity graph-augmentation framework that addresses both issues in a unified manner. RABot employs a neighborhood-aware oversampling strategy that linearly interpolates minority-class embeddings within local subgraphs, thereby stabilizing the decision boundary under low-resource regimes. Concurrently, a reinforcement-learning-driven edge-filtering module combines similarity-based edge features with adaptive threshold optimization to excise spurious interactions during message passing, yielding a cleaner topology. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks and four GNN backbones demonstrate that RABot consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, since its augmentation and filtering modules are orthogonal to the underlying architecture, RABot can be seamlessly integrated into existing GNN pipelines to boost performance with minimal overhead.

Longlong Zhang, Xi Wang, Haotong Du +3

School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University · Shenzhen Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University · School of Automation Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University +1

Social Bot Detection Graph Data Augmentation Data Augmentation Class-Imbalanced Learning Graph Neural Networks Graph Structure Learning

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