BotCL: a social bot detection model based on graph contrastive learning

Abstract

The proliferation of social bots on social networks presents significant challenges to network security due to their malicious activities. While graph neural network models have shown promise in detecting social bots, acquiring a large number of high-quality labeled accounts remains challenging, impacting bot detection performance. To address this issue, we introduce BotCL, a social bot detection model that employs contrastive learning through data augmentation. Initially, we build a directed graph based on following/follower relationships, utilizing semantic, attribute, and structural features of accounts as initial node features. We then simulate account behaviors within the social network and apply two data augmentation techniques to generate multiple views of the directed graph. Subsequently, we encode the generated views using relational graph convolutional networks, achieving maximum homogeneity in node representations by minimizing the contrastive loss. Finally, node labels are predicted using Softmax. The proposed method augments data based on its distribution, showcasing robustness to noise. Extensive experimental results on Cresci-2015, Twibot-20, and Twibot-22 datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance.