Frustrate Twitter from automation: How far a user can be trusted?

Abstract

In recent years, the popularity of social networking sites proves a lofty raise in their users. Twitter, a micro blogging service less than seven years old, commands more than 500 million users as of July 2012 and is still growing fast. In Twitter, users exchange their ideas through a text based posts called tweets which can have maximum 140 characters. The prevalence and open structure of Twitter paved a way for automated programs, known as bots, which becomes a tremendous threat for its users. In this paper, we differentiate the trustworthy human users and the automated programs (bots) to make the user understand with whom they are interacting with. We developed a few sample of bot programs to compare their characteristics with the characteristics of normal human user. We observed the difference among human and bot in terms of tweeting behavior, tweet content, account properties and its networking flow characteristics. Based on the experimental results, we effectively differentiate the users into human and bot.