Enhancing Social Bot Detection in Twitter/X Through Explainable Hybrid AI Models

The creation and authentication of real users on social media requires the implementation of artificial intelligence-based technologies that can mitigate malicious behavior from automated accounts. This study presents a machine learning-based approach for detecting social bots on Twitter/X, based on the analysis of user profile features and behavioral attributes. Four classification models were evaluated: a neural network (NN), support vector machines (SVM), a random forest classifier (RF), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), using five-fold stratified cross-validation. To improve the performance and robustness of the classification, additional features and data balancing techniques were incorporated. The experimental results show that the neural network achieved the best overall performance, with an average accuracy of 95.6 ± 0.6%, followed by the random forest (95.0 ± 0.6%), the linear SVM (94.1 ± 1.5%) and XGBoost (94.0 ± 1.1%). These results demonstrate that the proposed methodology improves the automated detection of social bots while maintaining the interpretability of the models, which contributes to the development of more reliable and explainable security mechanisms for social media platforms.