Pattern Identification of Bot Messages for Media Literacy

Abstract

The massive use of online social media is a reality nowadays. Such an increasing usage also raises growth in malicious activities in social media, one of which is the use of automated users (bots) that disseminate false information and can insert bias in analyses done on gathered social media data. Based on the concept of media literacy, this research presents a method to teach the human user to identify a pattern of a text produced by a bot, providing a tool (guide) to analyze social media text. Users who learned to identify a bot user with the guide had an average of 90% accuracy in the classification of new messages, against 57% of the participants who had no contact with the guide. The produced guide received a usefulness rating between 4 and 5 by the participants (scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest value).