Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such automated programs, it is still unclear how technically sophisticated those bots are, which platforms they target, and where they originate from. To answer these questions, we gathered repository data from open source collaboration platforms to identify the status-quo of social bot development as well as first insights into the overall skills of publicly available bot code.
Disinformation in Open Online Media