On Twitter Bots Behaving Badly: A Manual and Automated Analysis of Python Code Patterns on GitHub

Bots, i.e., algorithmically driven entities that behave like humans in online communications, are increasingly infiltrating social conversations on the Web. If not properly prevented, this presence of bots may cause harm to the humans they interact with. This article aims to understand which types of abuse may lead to harm and whether these can be considered intentional or not. We manually review a dataset of 60 Twitter bot code repositories on GitHub, derive a set of potentially abusive actions, characterize them using a taxonomy of abstract code patterns, and assess the potential abusiveness of the patterns. The article then describes the design and implementation of a code pattern recognizer and uses the pattern recognizer to automatically analyze a dataset of 786 Python bot code repositories. The study does not only reveal the existence of 28 communication-specific code patterns - which could be used to assess the harmfulness of bot code - but also their consistent presence throughout all studied repositories.