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Entropy-Based Automation Detection on Twitter Using DNA Profiling

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Abstract

Twitter is a popular microblogging-based online social network (OSN) that acts as a platform for users to express themselves and enrich public relationships. Monthly active users in twitter have reached approximately 237.8 million by 2023. With the rise in popularity, there is also a proportional increase in the number of automated accounts. Some bots conduct productive tasks such as posting news and delivering disaster alerts. However, there also exist some bots that are used as vectors to mislead legitimate users by spreading misinformation or distributing malware. Therefore, detecting malicious bots is crucial for maintaining a safe and secure Twitter environment. In this paper, a novel technique to identify bots by analyzing the degree of regularity in user behavior is proposed. Real-time tweets of users are mined and their online behaviors are characterized as DNA sequences. Further, we integrate approximate entropy to assess the degree of regularity in numerically encoded DNA sequences. Accounts with entropy values lower than a fixed threshold represent bots. The outcomes of the experiments conducted in real-time Twitter data demonstrated that the proposed detection technique achieves a precision of 0.9573, recall of 0.9961, F1 score of 0.9609, and accuracy of 0.9563.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Govindasamy Vaiyapuri for his comments and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions and careful reading of the manuscript. This work has been supported by the Research Grant No. SPG/2020/000594 under the SERB POWER grant scheme, Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India., to Akila Venkatesan, Puducherry Technological University, India.

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This work was supported by the SERB POWER grant scheme, Science and Engineering Research Board under Research Grant No. SPG/2020/000594.

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  1. Department of Information Technology, IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram, India

    Rosario Gilmary

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Puducherry Technological University (PTU), Puducherry, India

    Akila Venkatesan

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  1. Rosario Gilmary
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Correspondence to Rosario Gilmary.

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Gilmary, R., Venkatesan, A. Entropy-Based Automation Detection on Twitter Using DNA Profiling. SN COMPUT. SCI. 4, 847 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-023-02324-9

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