Composable Hybrid Approach to Recognizing bots and their Influence in Social Media Analysis (CHARISMA)

Social media is transforming the way people around the world share messages, receive information, and come together to act. Unlike most traditional media, social media is built on a technical foundation that enables messages to spread quickly and widely, can be used to disguise the true source of messages, and can be used to produce automated messages that may have influential and manipulative effects on users. The use of automated social media accountssocial botstakes advantage of these properties of social media to spread messages with the intent of influencing or motivating audiences toward particular opinions or behavior, or flooding the discourse to prevent the true voices from being heard. The use of social bots presents a challenge to a wide range of analysts and social media researchers as they attempt to recognize these bots, evaluate the impact the bots have on public opinion and real-world activity, and understand how the bots operate. To provide an automated means for detecting social bots, evaluating their impact, and understanding how they operate, we propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Composable Hybrid Approach to Recognizing bots and their Influence in Social Media Analysis (CHARISMA).