Does Homophily Make Socialbots More Influential? Exploring Infiltration Strategies

Socialbots are intelligent software controlling all the behavior of fake accounts in an online social network. They use artificial intelligence techniques to pass themselves off as human social media users. Socialbots exploit user trust to achieve their malicious goals, such as astroturfing, performing Sybil attacks, spamming, and harvesting private data. The first phase to countermeasure the malicious activities of the socialbots is studying their characteristics and revealing strategies they can employ to successfully infiltrate stealthily into target online social network. In this paper,we investigate the success of using different infiltration strategies in terms of infiltration performance and being stealthy. Every strategy is characterized by socialbots profile and behavioral characteristics. The findings from this study illustrate that assuming a specific taste for the tweets a socialbot retweets and/or likes make it more influential. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that considering the presence of common characteristics and similarity increase the probability of being followed by other users. This is in complete agreement with homophily concept which is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others in social networks.