device for detecting and analyzing information manipulation strategies by bot armies on Twitter – Beelzebot

For several years and the advent of social networks, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have played an important role in accessing and disseminating information. They play a role in the global environment of information circulation in a logic that is both plural and transmedia. In this context of infobesity and intense media activity, communication strategies can be developed in order to manipulate circulating information with multiple objectives: creation of untruths, fake news, distortion of reality, modification of context, etc.
Advanced and innovative technical means are then mobilized in order to organize this mass manipulation of public opinion. Among the techniques deployed, the use of social robots is increasingly frequent and mobilizes sophisticated tools that are difficult to detect by human activity. It is therefore necessary to be able to identify these manipulators at an early stage and to anticipate and understand their logic and operating strategies in order to counter influence campaigns, particularly in sensitive situations.?
The challenge of the project is to understand the functioning not only of social robots (bots) but especially of the botnets implemented within the sociotechnical device that is Twitter. It also aims to measure their impact in the dissemination of information and in the structuring of communities and their evolution. This challenge and ambition requires 4 key points: 1) a detection of social bots, whether they are alone, organized in groups, simulating or impersonating users; 2) a typologization of bots related to their functioning; 3) a measurement of their influence in the social network; and 4) the identification of their roles in the circulation of discourses. An inter and multidisciplinary approach will be implemented.