A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF A DETECTIVE
MODEL FOR SOCIAL BOT CLASSIFICATION
The International Journal of Ambient Systems and applications(IJASA), 10 (4):
10 (December 2023)Abstract
Social media platform has greatly enhanced human interactive activities in the virtual community. Virtual
socialization has positively influenced social bonding among social media users irrespective of one’s
location in the connected global village. Human user and social bot user are the two types of social media
users. While human users personally operate their social media accounts, social bot users are developed
software that manages a social media account for the human user called the botmaster. This botmaster in
most cases are hackers with bad intention of attacking social media users through various attacking mode
using social bots. The aim of this research work is to design an intelligent framework that will prevent
attacks through social bots on social media network platforms.
Description
Virtual socialization has greatly enhanced social bonding irrespective of one’s location in the
global village. Different social media platform exists to help with different aspects of social
interactions. During the past decade, social media like Twitter and Facebook emerged as a
widespread tool for massive-scale and real-time communication [1]. Twitter and Facebook alone
attracts over 500 million users across the world [2] which shows a rapid growth in the virtual
community. Two categories of social media users identified in this virtual community are human
users and social bot users. While human users personally operate their social media accounts,
social bot users are developed software that manages a social media account for the human user
called the botmaster. A typical example of a social bot user is a twitter bot which can be
automated to write tweets, re-tweet, and like a tweet. Twitter platform does not mind the use of
Twitter bot accounts as long as they do not break the Terms of Service of the platform [3]. Just as
there are good human social media users and bad users called hackers, there are also good social
bot user that manages the botmaster’s account and bad ones as well used for attacks on the social
media platform. Majority of human users of the social media platform are less knowledgeable
about the functionality, security features and precautionary measures necessary to enhance safe
interaction in the social cyberspace. In a more convenient way, bad users called hackers
preferably employ the use of bad social bots to attack unsuspecting users. Hence, differentiating
between a human user and bad social bot user becomes essential to inform a naïve user on the
level of trust to be given to a social connection for virtual interaction