Misleading information is nothing new, yet its impacts seem only to grow. We investigate this phenomenon in the context of social bots. Social bots are software agents that mimic humans. They are intended to interact with humans while supporting specific agendas. This work explores the effect of social bots on the spread of misinformation on Facebook during the Fall of 2016 and prototypes a tool for their detection. Using a dataset of about two million user comments discussing the posts of public pages for nine verified news outlets, we first annotate a large dataset for social bots. We then develop and evaluate commercially implementable bot detection software for public pages with an overall F1 score of 0.71. Applying this software, we found only a small percentage (0.06%) of the commenting user population to be social bots. However, their activity was extremely disproportionate, producing comments at a rate more than fifty times higher (3.5%). Finally, we observe that one might commonly encounter social bot comments at a rate of about one in ten on mainstream outlet and reliable content news posts. In light of these findings and to support page owners and their communities we release prototype code and software to help moderate social bots on Facebook.

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Background Increased adoption of off-the-shelf conversational agents (CAs) brings opportunities to integrate therapeutic interventions. Motivational Interviewing (MI) can then be integrated with CAs for cost-effective access to it. MI can be especially beneficial for parents who often have low motivation because of limited time and resources to eat healthy together with their children. Objective We developed a Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent (MICA) to improve healthy eating in parents who serve as a proxy for health behavior change in their children. Proxy relationships involve a person serving as a catalyst for behavior change in another person. Parents, serving as proxies, can bring about behavior change in their children. Methods We conducted user test sessions of the MICA prototype to understand the perceived acceptability and usefulness of the MICA prototype by parents. A total of 24 parents of young children participated in 2 user test sessions with MICA, approximately 2 weeks apart. After parents’ interaction with the MICA prototype in each user test session, we used qualitative interviews to understand parents’ perceptions and suggestions for improvements in MICA. Results Findings showed participants’ perceived usefulness of MICAs for helping them self-reflect and motivating them to adopt healthier eating habits together with their children. Participants further suggested various ways in which MICA can help them safely manage their children’s eating behaviors and provide customized support for their proxy needs and goals. Conclusions We have discussed how the user experience of CAs can be improved to uniquely offer support to parents who serve as proxies in changing the behavior of their children. We have concluded with implications for a larger context of designing MI-based CAs for supporting proxy relationships for health behavior change.

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