Bots fired: examining social bot evidence in online mass shooting conversations

Abstract

Mass shootings, like other extreme events, have long garnered public curiosity and, in turn, significant media coverage. The media framing, or topic focus, of mass shooting events typically evolves over time from details of the actual shooting to discussions of potential policy changes (e.g., gun control, mental health). Such media coverage has been historically provided through traditional media sources such as print, television, and radio, but the advent of online social networks (OSNs) has introduced a new platform for accessing, producing, and distributing information about such extreme events. The ease and convenience of OSN usage for information within society's larger growing reliance upon digital technologies introduces potential unforeseen risks. Social bots, or automated software agents, are one such risk, as they can serve to amplify or distort potential narratives associated with extreme events such as mass shootings. In this paper, we seek to determine the prevalence and relative importance of social bots participating in OSN conversations following mass shooting events using an ensemble of quantitative techniques. Specifically, we examine a corpus of more than 46 million tweets produced by 11.7 million unique Twitter accounts within OSN conversations discussing four major mass shooting events: the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting, the 2017 Sutherland Springs church chooting, the 2018 Parkland School Shooting and the 2018 Santa Fe school shooting. This study's results show that social bots participate in and contribute to online mass shooting conversations in a manner that is distinguishable from human contributions. Furthermore, while social bots accounted for fewer than 1% of total corpus user contributors, social network analysis centrality measures identified many bots with significant prominence in the conversation networks, densely occupying many of the highest eigenvector and out-degree centrality measure rankings, to include 82% of the top-100 eigenvector values of the Las Vegas retweet network.

A combined synchronization index for evaluating collective action social media

“…Coupled with previous work which shows a high engagement of humans with bots (Schuchard et al. 2019 ), the higher synchronization values between bot-human pairs show that the two classes of users can coordinate with each other across physical boundaries bridged by the social media platforms.…”

“…The observation of synchronization of bots and humans indicates that the two classes are working together to push a common narrative, revealing coordinated activity within the network. Coupled with previous work which shows a high engagement of humans with bots (Schuchard et al 2019), the higher synchronization values between bot-human pairs show that the two unfavorable towards the social public. This synchronization exchange between bothuman pairs should be carefully watched, because only 5-10% of bots echoing the same topic in the network is sufficient to tilt the balance of the public opinion towards the bots' desired opinion (Cheng et al 2020;Ross et al 2019).…”

A Combined Synchronization Index for Grassroots Activism on Social Media

“…The observation of synchronization of bots and humans indicates that the two classes are working together to push a common narrative, revealing coordinated activity within the network. Coupled with previous work which shows a high engagement of humans with bots [19], the higher synchronization values between bot-human pairs show that the two classes of users can coordinate with each other across physical boundaries bridged by the social media platforms.…”

“…Bots were not actively synchronizing with each other in original posts during the CharlieHebdo shooting event. This mirrors studies on shootings where posts contributed by bots can outpace humans in some events but are lag behind in other events [19]. It is thus an open research topic to identify the events that bots take an interest in.…”

Responses to mass shooting events

“…Although OSNs are particularly convenient for publishing and consuming content about breaking events, they have proven to be more susceptible to manipulation compared with more traditional media outlets. In particular, OSNs have often been used to spread and amplify incorrect, misleading, or false narratives to achieve certain public opinion goals (Bolsover & Howard, ; Lazer, Baum, & Benkler, ; Starbird, ; Schuchard, Crooks, Stefanidis, & Croitoru, ; Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, ). Such manipulations can lead to fallacious changes in public opinion that could then propagate to and influence the policy‐making process.…”