# BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00975 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00975/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Security of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08689/) (2024)
- [MGTAB: A Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01123/) (2023)
- [BIC: Twitter Bot Detection with Text-Graph Interaction and Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08320/) (2022)
- [Retweet-BERT: Political Leaning Detection Using Language Features and Information Diffusion on Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08349/) (2022)
- [BotTriNet: A Unified and Efficient Embedding for Social Bots Detection via Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03144/) (2023)
- [Social-LLM: Modeling User Behavior at Scale using Language Models and Social Network Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00893/) (2023)
- [Online Detection of LLM-Generated Texts via Sequential Hypothesis Testing by Betting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22318/) (2024)
- [LLMs Among Us: Generative AI Participating in Digital Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07940/) (2024)
- [Online User Profiling to Detect Social Bots on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05966/) (2022)
- [Over-Sampling Strategy in Feature Space for Graphs based Class-imbalanced Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06900/) (2023)
- [RF-GNN: Random Forest Boosted Graph Neural Network for Social Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08239/) (2023)
- [Annotation-Scheme Reconstruction for "Fake News" and Japanese Fake News Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02718/) (2022)
- [Socialbots on Fire: Modeling Adversarial Behaviors of Socialbots via Multi-Agent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10655/) (2021)
- [Identification of Twitter Bots Based on an Explainable Machine Learning Framework: The US 2020 Elections Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04913/) (2021)
- [MulBot: Unsupervised Bot Detection Based on Multivariate Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10361/) (2022)
- [Wearing Masks Implies Refuting Trump?: Towards Target-specific User Stance Prediction across Events in COVID-19 and US Election 2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12029/) (2023)
- [False Information, Bots and Malicious Campaigns: Demystifying Elements of Social Media Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12497/) (2023)
- [Muti-scale Graph Neural Network with Signed-attention for Social Bot Detection: A Frequency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01968/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Detection of Bots on X (Twitter) using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14484/) (2023)
- [Unmasking Social Bots: How Confident Are We?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13929/) (2024)
- [TRACE-Bot: Detecting Emerging LLM-Driven Social Bots via Implicit Semantic Representations and AIGC-Enhanced Behavioral Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02147/) (2026)
- [Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07436/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Information Cascades in Online Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00904/) (2022)
- [Russo-Ukrainian War: Prediction and explanation of Twitter suspension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03502/) (2023)
- [BSG4Bot: Efficient Bot Detection based on Biased Heterogeneous Subgraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05356/) (2024)
- [A Graph Neural Architecture Search Approach for Identifying Bots in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16285/) (2024)
- [Certainly Bot Or Not? Trustworthy Social Bot Detection via Robust Multi-Modal Neural Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09626/) (2025)
- [SOK: Fake News Outbreak 2021: Can We Stop the Viral Spread?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10671/) (2021)
- [Detecting Propaganda on the Sentence Level during the COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12269/) (2021)
- [Regional Differences in Information Privacy Concerns After the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07075/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cases of social bots imitating humans to manipulate discussions, alter the popularity of users, pollute content and spread misinformation, and even perform terrorist propaganda and recruitment actions. Here we present BotOrNot, a publicly-available service that leverages more than one thousand features to evaluate the extent to which a Twitter account exhibits similarity to the known characteristics of social bots. Since its release in May 2014, BotOrNot has served over one million requests via our website and APIs.