Contemporary cryptocurrencies lack legal, monetary, and institutional backing that traditional financial services employ. Instead, cryptocurrencies provide trust through technology. Despite the plethora of research in both trust and cryptocurrencies, the underlying attributes of the technologies that drive trust in cryptocurrencies are not well understood. To uncover these attributes, we analyze the corpus of 1.97 million discussion posts related to Bitcoin, the oldest and most widely used cryptocurrency. Based on earlier research, we identified functionality, reliability, and helpfulness as the focal constructs with which to evaluate users' trust in technology. In our analysis, we discovered 11 different attributes related to three technology constructs that are significant in creating and maintaining users' trust in Bitcoin. The findings are discussed in detail in the article.
In recent years, the impact of bots used for manipulating public opinion has become an increasingly prevalent topic in politics. Numerous sources have reported about the presence of political bots in social media sites such as Twitter. Compared to other countries, the influence of bots in Finnish politics has received little attention from media and researchers. This study aims to investigate the influence of bots on Finnish political Twitter, based on a dataset consisting of the accounts following major Finnish politicians before the Finnish parliamentary election of 2019. To identify the bots, we extend the existing models with the use of user-level metadata and state-of-art classification models. The results support our model as a suitable instrument for detecting Twitter bots. We found that, albeit there is a huge amount of bot accounts following major Finnish politicians, it is unlikely resulting from foreign entities' attempts to influence the Finnish parliamentary election.
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