Social bots can affect online communication among humans. We study this phenomenon by focusing on #YaMeCanse, the most active protest hashtag in the history of Twitter in Mexico. Accounts using the hashtag are classified using the BotOrNot bot detection tool. Our preliminary analysis suggests that bots played a critical role in disrupting online communication about the protest movement.
Twitter bots have been alleged to influence the political discourse surrounding Brexit in the United Kingdom @cite_3 . To evaluate the role of bots, opinions were clustered based on hashtag use. It was found that a very small fraction of most active accounts was responsible for a large fraction of pro-Brexit content: fewer than 2,000 accounts in a collection of 300,000 users (less than 1 Network decomposition techniques were used to conclude that the success of social protests depends in part on activating a critical periphery @cite_1 . These peripheral participants may be as essential to the communication of the protest message as the most connected and active members. The influence of bots, hindering communication and blocking potential adhesion of new members to a community, could lead to a halt in the movement's growth.
@cite_1 @cite_3
2466146218 2767473784 2724523750 2550819555
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots during the UK referendum on EU membership, we analyze the tweeting patterns for both human users and bots. We find that political bots have a small but strategic role in the referendum conversations: (1) the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates, (2) different perspectives on the issue utilize different levels of automation, and (3) less than 1 percent of sampled accounts generate almost a third of all the messages. AbstractBrexit i.e. “British Exit” is one of the major events in the history of economics and British politics. When EU referendum took place, 52 of votes were in favor of United Kingdom leaving the European Union. This was a major event affecting the overall economy of Britain and was also one of the most talked about events. Twitter is a social network platform where users from all over the world discussed a lot about Brexit and British politics. Analysis of such user generated text can reveal a lot about the event and what people think of it. Sentiment analysis is a trending technique to get insights from any written text. Our aim in this study is to analyze the tweets geospatially and then perform Geo-spatial Sentiment analysis based on the location of the events verses the geospatial tweets distribution for that particular event on global level. Also shows the keywords and hashtags were mostly used by people during that time and how they were being used i.e. which hashtag was used positively, which ... Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been coordinated by means of bots, social media accounts controlled by computer scripts that try to disguise themselves as legitimate human users. In this study, we describe one such operation that occurred in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election. We collected a massive Twitter dataset of nearly 17 million posts, posted between 27 April and 7 May 2017 (Election Day). We then set to study the MacronLeaks disinformation campaign: By leveraging a mix of machine learning and cognitive behavioral modeling techniques, we separated humans from bots, and then studied the activities of the two groups independently, as well as their interplay. We provide a characterization of both the bots and the users who engaged with them, and oppose it to those users who didn’t. Prior interests of disinformation adopters pinpoint to the reasons of scarce success of this campaign: the users who engaged with MacronLeaks are mostly foreigners with pre-existing interest in alt-right topics and alternative news media, rather than French users with diverse political views. Concluding, anomalous account usage patterns suggest the possible existence of a black market for reusable political disinformation bots. Social media have been extensively praised for increasing democratic discussion on social issues related to policy and politics. However, what happens when this powerful communication tools are exploited to manipulate online discussion, to change the public perception of political entities, or even to try affecting the outcome of political elections? In this study we investigated how the presence of social media bots, algorithmically driven entities that on the surface appear as legitimate users, affect political discussion around the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. By leveraging state-of-the-art social bot detection algorithms, we uncovered a large fraction of user population that may not be human, accounting for a significant portion of generated content (about one-fifth of the entire conversation). We inferred political partisanships from hashtag adoption, for both humans and bots, and studied spatio-temporal communication, political support dynamics, and influence mechanisms by discovering the level of network embeddedness of the bots. Our findings suggest that the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it, which in turn can potentially alter public opinion and endanger the integrity of the Presidential election.