Composable Hybrid Approach to Recognizing bots and their Influence in Social Media Analysis (CHARISMA) Navy STTR FY2015.A Sol No.: Navy STTR FY2015.A Topic No.: N15A-T020 Topic Title: Composable Hybrid Approach to Recognizing bots and their Influence in Social Media Analysis (CHARISMA) Proposal No.: N15A-020-0020 Firm: Charles River Analytics Inc. 625 Mount Auburn Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Contact: Corey Lofdahl Phone: (617) 491-3474 Abstract: Social media is transforming the way people around the world share messages, receive information, and come together to act. Unlike most traditional media, social media is built on a technical foundation that enables messages to spread quickly and widely, can be used to disguise the true source of messages, and can be used to produce automated messages that may have influential and manipulative effects on users. The use of automated social media accounts-social bots-takes advantage of these properties of social media to spread messages with the intent of influencing or motivating audiences toward particular opinions or behavior, or flooding the discourse to prevent the true voices from being heard. The use of social bots presents a challenge to a wide range of analysts and social media researchers as they attempt to recognize these bots, evaluate the impact the bots have on public opinion and real-world activity, and understand how the bots operate. To provide an automated means for detecting social bots, evaluating their impact, and understanding how they operate, we propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Composable Hybrid Approach to Recognizing bots and their Influence in Social Media Analysis (CHARISMA). Benefits: We envision immediate benefit of the CHARISMA system for applications in social media analysis in non-kinetic operations (e.g., information operations) by supporting the recognition and understanding of social bot activity. Charles River Analytics is already interacting with relevant Marine organizations (e.g., the Marine Corps Information Operation Center (MCIOC)), providing software to Warfighters to understand and manage information environments under an existing program of record. The work under CHARISMA intersects with that software and the related user community. In addition, Charles River plans to transition CHARISMA into existing social media analysis tools as well as our emerging Social Media Toolkit software suite to increase its commercial validity. Return