Emoji-Driven Sentiment Analysis for Social Bot Detection with Relational Graph Convolutional Networks

The proliferation of malicious social bots poses severe threats to cybersecurity and social media information ecosystems. Existing detection methods often overlook the semantic value and emotional cues conveyed by emojis in user-generated tweets. To address this gap, we propose ESA-BotRGCN, an emoji-driven multi-modal detection framework that integrates semantic enhancement, sentiment analysis, and multi-dimensional feature modeling. Specifically, we first establish emoji–text mapping relationships using the Emoji Library, leverage GPT-4 to improve textual coherence, and generate tweet embeddings via RoBERTa. Subsequently, seven sentiment-based features are extracted to quantify statistical disparities in emotional expression patterns between bot and human accounts. An attention gating mechanism is further designed to dynamically fuse these sentiment features with user description, tweet content, numerical attributes, and categorical features. Finally, a Relational Graph Convolutional Network (RGCN) is employed to model heterogeneous social topology for robust bot detection. Experimental results on the TwiBot-20 benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method achieves a superior accuracy of 87.46%, significantly outperforming baseline models and validating the effectiveness of emoji-driven semantic and sentiment enhancement strategies.