Emotions and Interests of Evolving Twitter Bots

Bot accounts are computer algorithms populating our online ecosystem. They often feature goals that are far from being benign: distribution of spam, inflated sponsorship of public characters, biased influence on the audience's judgements. The endless game of cat and mouse between Academia and bot developers proves that bots evolve over time, imitating human online behaviour and making themselves undetectable even by state-of-art detection tools. This peculiarity inspires the current work: the adoption of text mining tools to evaluate if it is possible to infer typology and purpose of bots from the feelings and interests expressed in their posts. The experiments, carried out on a large corpus of Twitter data, show a connection between the two considered dimensions (feeling and interest) and the characteristics of the evolutionary waves of accounts.