Strategies to combat hostile influence

The aim of this Open Education Resource (OER) titled "Strategies to combat the effects of bots" is to provide a comprehensive resource for understanding and addressing the issue of disinformation and social media bots. The OER focuses on preventive approaches to tackle disinformation by developing systems to detect social media bot accounts even before they start posting. It covers key features of the process for identifying fake content associated with social media accounts, such as profile analysis, activity timelines, stance and sentiment analysis, and relationships with other accounts.

Additionally, it presents various strategies to combat the effects of bots, including graph-based methods, machine learning approaches (supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised), crowdsourcing, and anomaly-based detection. These strategies aim to identify and counter disinformation campaigns and social media botnets in their early stages.

The OER's primary objective is to equip individuals and organizations with the knowledge and tools needed to proactively address the challenges posed by bots and disinformation on social media platforms. The interactive OER is available at this link: https://view.genial.ly/64efbed84220ae001943241d/presentation-234-oer | This OER was developed in collaboration between: "Mihai Viteazul" National Intelligence Academy  (MVNIA) - Romania, Cyberimaginario Research Group of Rey Juan Carlos University - Spain, L-Università ta' Malta and New Strategy Center - Romania.