IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020 - 57

Socialbot as a Threat
Socialbot as a
Political Tool

Socialbot as a
Fake News
Dissiminator

Socialbot as a
Spammer

Socialbot as a
Infiltrator

Astroturfing

Opinion
Manipulation

Clickbait

Stalking

Fame Fostering

Rumor

Content
Pollution

Spear Phishing

Opinion
Manipulation

Misinformation

Spoofing

Rumor

Disinformation

Malware
Propagation

Identify Theft

Misinformation

Hoax

Spear Phishing

Follower
Trapping

Disinformation

Satire

Hoax

FIGURE 6. Different types of socialbots misuse and related threats.

of its content is vital to ensuring the confidence of all
stakeholders. Recently, the world economic forum6 has
expressed concern over the use of automatic agents in
fake news and misinformation diffusion. A study reports
that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, socialbots distorted the political discourse and massively diffused fake reports and false information [2]. Studies
also report the involvement of socialbots in fake news
propagation in the form of misinformation, disinformation, and hoaxes [4]. The socialbots network along with
humans can be misused to spread unsubstantiated
information and make it influential. Apart from socialbots, humans are also responsible for spreading fake
news [17].

Socialbots as Spammers
Spams even existed during the ARPANET period. However, as technologies evolved, spammers also evolved to
abuse them. On the Web, spammers exploited bot technology to automate and carry out illegitimate activities,
such as phishing, hacking, and identity theft. Similarly,
spammers are also targeting OSNs using various forms
of fake profiles. They also automated the spamming
process using automated handling of these profiles.
6

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/how-can-we-defeat-fake-news
-automate-the-right-to-reply/

SEPTEMBER 2020

∕

Spamming campaigns on OSNs are now generally operated using bots due to the easy accessibility of the OSN
application program interface (API), real-time proliferation, and large user base [18]. Initially, spambots were
conducting spam campaigns on the Web for content
pollution, advertising, and so on. However, with the
inception of OSN, a new breed of spammers, called
social spambots, came into existence with a more
deceptive nature and consequences [19]. Social spambots, a variant of socialbot, are created to perform
stealth spamming activities like spear phishing, identity
theft, information harvesting, and account hacking [4],
[20]. These are defining new dimensions of spamming
in terms of deception and sophistication level. In a seminal work, Cresci et al. [19] analyzed the behavioral difference among the normal users, conventional
spambots, and social spambots. On analysis, they
found that human annotators can easily differentiate
between conventional spambots and real users, but
failed to differentiate between social spambots and real
users. This is because social spambots imitate human
users to build a reputation in the network and then
exploit it to carry out stealth spamming activities. As a
result, it is difficult to distinguish social spambots from
real users. Researchers are devising novel techniques
for social spambot detection [21], [22]. However, as
approaches become mature and advanced, spammers

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020

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