A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, posing a risk to democratic processes. There is thus a growing need to identify and eliminate "influence bots" - realistic, automated identities that illicitly shape discussion on sites like Twitter and Facebook - before they get too influential. Spurred by such events, DARPA held a 4-week competition in February/March 2015 in which multiple teams supported by the DARPA Social Media in Strategic Communications program competed to identify a set of previously identified "influence bots" serving as ground truth on a specific topic within Twitter. Past work regarding influence bots often has difficulty supporting claims about accuracy, since there is limited ground truth (though some exceptions do exist [3,7]). However, with the exception of [3], no past work has looked specifically at identifying influence bots on a specific topic. This paper describes the DARPA Challenge and describes the methods used by the three top-ranked teams.

为了识别和消除在社交媒体上操纵舆论的『操纵机器人』，DARPA在2015年2月/3月举办了一项竞赛，多个在DARPA社交媒体战略传播计划支持下的团队参赛，本文介绍了这次竞赛以及三个最高排名团队所使用的方法。

DARPA Twitter Bot 挑战赛