Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization remains largely understudied. In this work, we contribute new insights into the role of bots in spreading religious hatred on Arabic Twitter and introduce a novel regression model that can accurately identify Arabic language bots. Our assessment shows that existing tools that are highly accurate in detecting English bots don't perform as well on Arabic bots. We identify the possible reasons for this poor performance, perform a thorough analysis of linguistic, content, behavioral and network features, and report on the most informative features that distinguish Arabic bots from humans as well as the differences between Arabic and English bots. Our results mark an important step toward understanding the behavior of malicious bots on Arabic Twitter and pave the way for a more effective Arabic bot detection tools.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.