Identifying Bots that Spread Fake News

Fake news is not new. However, the phenomenal growth of online social media coupled with ease in publishing unverified content and click based advertisement revenue, have made fake news a strong influencer in driving discussions. Though often considered innocuous, such influences may have high social cost. For example, Parkinson [2] reported that the sheer inactivity of social media companies might have contributed to the results of the 2016 US presidential election. Most existing research on fake news have considered the origin, the motivations and the impact of fake news, but not the use of bots. Either for spreading an ideology or for making money, the goal of fake news creators is to spread their message rapidly, so the likely use of bots (or human assisted bots) in the process is hard to dismiss. In our investigation, we find social bots that are actively being used on Twitter to fool the content promotion algorithms and promote specific agenda.