The Spread of Low-Credibility Content by Social Bots (Nature Comms 2018)
A Twitter dataset of 25,327 nodes, 629,514 edges, collected by Shao et al. via Hoaxy + Botometer (OSoMe/Indiana University). Each record contains user centralities (betweenness, pagerank), bot scores, retweet graph, user-domain bipartite graph. Retweet network of low-credibility content with per-user bot scores; shows bots systematically amplify misinformation early in diffusion cascades.. Suitable for Bot-mediated misinformation diffusion, social bot impact measurement..
Cite this dataset at
osome-lowcred-bots.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 25,327 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Computed over the full corpus.
Record
- Catalog key
osome-lowcred-bots- Authors
- Shao, Chengcheng; Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca; Varol, Onur; Yang, Kai-Cheng; Flammini, Alessandro; Menczer, Filippo
- Year
- 2018
- Source paper
- The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
- DOI / arXiv
- 10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (CC-BY-4.0)
- Records
- 25,327
- Nodes
- 25,327
- Edges
- 629,514 (directed)
- Attributes
- nodes have no attributes; edges have no attributes
- Languages
- en
- Collected
- 2016-11/2017-10 (2010s)
- Tasks
- Bot detection inferred
From the graph: link prediction, community detection - Region
- Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)
Provenance
- Originally published at
- https://zenodo.org/records/1402267 link checked
- Hosted copy
- Mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-02, 65.5 MB across 7 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json.
Citations
The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, A. Flammini
Journal Article · Nature Communications · 2017
Cited by
- Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review
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E. Denniss, R. Lindberg · Health Promotion International · 2025 · cited 137× - Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet
Kai-Cheng Yang, F. Menczer · Journal of Quantitative Description Digital Media · 2023 · cited 125× - A comprehensive survey on machine learning approaches for fake news detection
Jawaher Alghamdi, Suhuai Luo et al. · Multimedia tools and applications · 2023 · cited 122×
Show all 10
- A new sociology of humans and machines
M. Tsvetkova, T. Yasseri et al. · Nature Human Behaviour · 2024 · cited 114× - Global Digital Compact: A Mechanism for the Governance of Online Discriminatory and Misleading Content Generation
Zhi Li, Wen-Yi Zhang et al. · International journal of human computer interactions · 2024 · cited 99× - Network distribution and sentiment interaction: Information diffusion mechanisms between social bots and human users on social media
Meng Cai, Han Luo et al. · Information Processing & Management · 2023 · cited 88× - Information Pandemic: A Critical Review of Disinformation Spread on Social Media and Its Implications for State Resilience
Dwi Surjatmodjo, A. Unde et al. · The social science · 2024 · cited 74× - Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data
Juergen Pfeffer, Daniel Matter et al. · International Conference on Web and Social Media · 2023 · cited 65×
Citation data from Semantic Scholar, retrieved 2026-10-19.
How to cite
BibTeX
@misc{echo2026,
title = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
year = {2026},
url = {https://echo.directory},
note = {Syracuse University}
}
@article{Shao_2018,
title = {The spread of low-credibility content by social bots},
volume = {9},
issn = {2041-1723},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7},
doi = {10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7},
number = {1},
journal = {Nature Communications},
publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},
author = {Shao, Chengcheng and Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca and Varol, Onur and Yang, Kai-Cheng and Flammini, Alessandro and Menczer, Filippo},
year = {2018},
month = Nov
} APA
Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory
Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G. L., Varol, O., Yang, K.-C., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2018). The Spread of Low-Credibility Content by Social Bots (Nature Comms 2018) [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7
MLA
Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.
Shao, Chengcheng, et al. The Spread of Low-Credibility Content by Social Bots (Nature Comms 2018). 2018, doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7.