Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is
generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present
a framework to detect such entities on Twitter. We leverage more than a
thousand features extracted from public data and meta-data about users:
friends, tweet content and sentiment, network patterns, and activity time
series. We benchmark the classification framework by using a publicly available
dataset of Twitter bots. This training data is enriched by a manually annotated
collection of active Twitter users that include both humans and bots of varying
sophistication. Our models yield high accuracy and agreement with each other
and can detect bots of different nature. Our estimates suggest that between 9%
and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots. Characterizing ties among
accounts, we observe that simple bots tend to interact with bots that exhibit
more human-like behaviors. Analysis of content flows reveals retweet and
mention strategies adopted by bots to interact with different target groups.
Using clustering analysis, we characterize several subclasses of accounts,
including spammers, self promoters, and accounts that post content from
connected applications.

本文提出了一个基于超过一千个公共数据和元数据特征的框架，用于检测 Twitter 上的社交媒体自主实体（即社交媒体机器人）。经测试，此框架能够与公开的 Twitter 机器人数据集高度契合，可以检测不同类型的机器人，如垃圾邮件发送者、自我推广者和使用连接应用程序发布内容的账户等，并且估计在活跃的 Twitter 账户中有 9% 至 15% 的机器人，机器人相互之间的交互关系有助于研究用于相互之间通信的转发和提到策略。