Stweeler: A Framework for Twitter Bot Analysis

Zafar Gilani, Liang Wang, Jon Crowcroft, Mário Almeida, Reza Farahbakhsh

Abstract: The WWW has seen a massive growth in variety and usage of OSNs. The rising population of users on Twitter and its open nature has made it an ideal platform for various kinds of opportunistic pursuits, such as news and emergency communication, business promotion, political campaigning, spamming and spreading malicious content. Most of these opportunistic pursuits are exploited through automated programs, known as bots. In this study we propose a framework (Stweeler) to study bot impact and influence on Twitter from systems and social media perspectives.