Benford’s Law can detect malicious social bots

Social bots are a growing presence and problem on social media. There is a burgeoning body of work on bot detection, often based in machine learning with a variety of sophisticated features. In this paper, we present a simple technique to detect bots: adherence with Benford’s Law. Benford’s Law states that, in naturally occurring systems, the frequency of numbers first digits is not evenly distributed. Numbers beginning with a 1 occur roughly 30...