Open AccessPattern Identification of Bot Messages for Media Literacy
Author(s) -
Eric Ferreira dos Santos,
Danilo Carvalho,
Jonice Oliveira
Publication year - 2021
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.5753/webmedia_estendido.2021.17607
Subject(s) - social media , computer science , dissemination , identification (biology) , world wide web , value (mathematics) , literacy , scale (ratio) , internet privacy , multimedia , data science , machine learning , psychology , telecommunications , pedagogy , botany , physics , quantum mechanics , biology
The massive use of online social media networks is a reality nowadays. Their increasing usage also raises growth in malicious activities in social media, one of which is the use of automated users (bots) that disseminate false information and can insert bias in analyses done on gathered social media data. Based on the concept of media literacy, this research presents a method to teach the human user to identify a pattern of a text produced by a bot, providing a tool (guide) to analyze social media text. Users who learned to identify a bot user with the guide had an average of 90% accuracy in the classification of new messages, against 57% of the participants who had no contact with the guide. The produced guide received a usefulness rating between 4 and 5 by the participants (scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest value).