Bot-Detective: An explainable Twitter bot detection service with crowdsourcing functionalities

Abstract

Popular microblogging platforms (such as Twitter) offer a fertile ground for open communication among humans, however, they also attract many bots and automated accounts "disguised" as human users. Typically, such accounts favor malicious activities such as phishing, public opinion manipulation and hate speech spreading, to name a few. Although several AI driven bot detection methods have been implemented, the justification of bot classification and characterization remains quite opaque and AI decisions lack in ethical responsibility. Most of these approaches operate with AI black-boxed algorithms and their efficiency is often questionable. In this work we propose Bot-Detective, a web service that takes into account both the efficient detection of bot users and the interpretability of the results as well. Our main contributions are summarized as follows: i) we propose a novel explainable bot-detection approach, which, to the best of authors' knowledge, is the first one to offer interpretable, responsible, and AI driven bot identification in Twitter, ii) we deploy a publicly available bot detection Web service which integrates an explainable ML framework along with users feedback functionality under an effective crowdsourcing mechanism; iii) we build the proposed service under a newly created annotated dataset by exploiting Twitter's rules and existing tools. This dataset is publicly shared for further use. In situ experimentation has showcased that Bot-Detective produces comprehensive and accurate results, with a promising service take up at scale.