A Large-scale Behavioural Analysis of Bots and Humans on Twitter

Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this article, we perform a comparative analysis of the usage and impact of bots and humans on Twitter—one of the largest OSNs in the world. We collect a large-scale Twitter dataset and define various metrics based on tweet metadata. Using a human annotation task, we assign “bot” and “human” ground-truth labels to the dataset and compare the annotations against an online bot detection tool for evaluation. We then ask a series of questions to discern important behavioural characteristics of bots and humans using metrics within and among four popularity groups. From the comparative analysis, we draw clear differences and interesting similarities between the two entities.