Online Social Behaviors: Robust and Stable Features for Detecting Microblog Bots

Bot accounts on microblogging platforms significantly impact information reliability and cyberspace security. Accurately identifying these bots is essential for effective community governance and opinion management. This article introduces a category of online social behavior features (OSBF), derived from microblog behaviors such as emotional expression, language organization, and self-description. Through a series of experiments, OSBF has demonstrated the stable and robust performance in characterizing and detecting microblog bots on Twitter and Chinese Weibo. By identifying significant differences in OSBF between bot and human accounts, we established an OSBF-based detection model. This model showed excellent performance across multitask and multiscale challenges in two English Twitter datasets. Additionally, we explored cross-language and cross-dataset applications using two Chinese Weibo datasets, further affirming the model's effectiveness and robustness. The experimental results confirm that our OSBF-based model surpasses existing methods in detecting microblog bots.