Social media platforms are a key ground of information consumption and dissemination. Key figures like politicians, celebrities, and activists have leveraged on its wide user base for strategic communication. Strategic communications, or StratCom, is the deliberate act of information creation and distribution. Its techniques are used by key figures for establishing brand and amplifying messages. Automated scripts are used on top of personal touches to effectively perform these tasks. The combination of automation and manual online posting creates a Cyborg social media profile, which is a hybrid between bot and human. In this study, we establish a quantitative definition for a Cyborg account, an account that is detected as bot in one time window, and identified as human in another. This definition makes use of frequent changes in bot classification labels and large differences in bot likelihood scores to identify Cyborgs. We perform a large-scale analysis across over 3.1 million users from Twitter collected from two key events, the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 US Elections. We extract Cyborgs from two datasets and employ tools from network science, natural language processing, and manual annotation to characterize Cyborg accounts. Our analyses identify Cyborg accounts are constructed for strategic communication uses, have a strong duality in their bot/human classification and are tactically positioned in the social media network, aiding these accounts to promote their desired content. Cyborgs are also discovered to have long online lives, indicating their ability to evade bot detectors, or the graciousness of platforms to allow their operations.

中文翻译：

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用于社交媒体上战略沟通的机器人

社交媒体平台是信息消费和传播的重要场所。政治家、名人和活动家等关键人物利用其广泛的用户群进行战略沟通。战略传播（StratCom）是一种有意识的信息创建和传播行为。关键人物使用其技术来建立品牌和放大信息。在个人接触的基础上使用自动化脚本来有效地执行这些任务。自动化和手动在线发布的结合创建了一个机器人社交媒体档案，它是机器人和人类的混合体。在这项研究中，我们为 Cyborg 帐户建立了定量定义，该帐户在一个时间窗口中被检测为机器人，而在另一个时间窗口中被识别为人类帐户。该定义利用机器人分类标签的频繁变化和机器人可能性分数的巨大差异来识别机器人。我们对从 2020 年冠状病毒大流行和 2020 年美国大选这两个关键事件中收集的超过 310 万 Twitter 用户进行了大规模分析。我们从两个数据集中提取机器人，并使用网络科学、自然语言处理和手动注释中的工具来表征机器人账户。我们的分析表明，Cyborg 帐户是为战略通信用途而构建的，在机器人/人类分类中具有很强的二元性，并且在社交媒体网络中进行战术定位，帮助这些帐户宣传其所需的内容。人们还发现，机器人的在线寿命很长，这表明他们有能力逃避机器人检测器，或者平台慷慨地允许他们进行操作。