Are Users Susceptible to Interaction with an Automated Account Different From Those That Do Not?

Oregon Convention Center 

This work studies a year of posting behavior of social media users interacting with bot accounts and how their behavior differs from that of users that do not interact with bots. The posting behavior is described by a combination of the user's weekly number of posts, words, and ats. We propose a flexible functional regression model model for the posting behavior of users to not only provide a framework to describe and interpret how susceptible accounts differ from those which are not, but also assess if there is evidence that a new user, whose posting behavior has been observed repeatedly, is susceptible to bot interaction. The proposed methodology is investigated in finite samples through simulations, including scenarios that mimic the data application.

Functional Data Analysis

Social Media

Testing

Social Bot Interaction

Posting Behavior 

Section on Nonparametric Statistics