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.
During the past few years, social media platforms have been criticized for reacting slowly to users distributing misinformation and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. Despite policies that have been introduced to specifically curb such content, this paper demonstrates how conspiracy theorists have thrived on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic and managed to push vaccine and health related misinformation without getting banned. We examine a dataset of approximately 8200 tweets and 8500 Twitter users participating in discussions around the conspiracy term Scamdemic. Furthermore, a subset of active and influential accounts was identified and inspected more closely and followed for a two-month period. The findings suggest that while bots are a lesser evil than expected, a failure to moderate the non-bot accounts that spread harmful content is the primary problem, as only 12.7% of these malicious accounts were suspended even after having frequently violated Twitter's policies using easily identifiable conspiracy terminology.
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