Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systems

Abstract

SignificanceSocial media can deeply influence reality perception, affecting millions of people’s voting behavior. Hence, maneuvering opinion dynamics by disseminating forged content over online ecosystems is an effective pathway for social hacking. We propose a framework for discovering such a potentially dangerous behavior promoted by automatic users, also called “bots,” in online social networks. We provide evidence that social bots target mainly human influencers but generate semantic content depending on the polarized stance of their targets. During the 2017 Catalan referendum, used as a case study, social bots generated and promoted violent content aimed at Independentists, ultimately exacerbating social conflict online. Our results open challenges for detecting and controlling the influence of such content on society.

Arming the public with artificial intelligence to counter social bots

“…Similar cases of political manipulation were reported in other countries (Stella, Ferrara, & De Domenico, ). Our analysis highlighted the presence of Twitter bots during the 2017 French Presidential Election (Ferrara, ).…”

“…For example, maximum‐likelihood estimation is employed by Varol, Ferrara, Davis, et al () to find the appropriate cutoff for binary classification: the best score above which an account is classified as a bot and below which it is classified as human. This threshold approach is useful for scientists counting bots in a collection (Gorwa, ; Haustein et al, ; Shao, Ciampaglia, et al, ; Stella et al, ; Suárez‐Serrato, Roberts, Davis, & Menczer, ), but it is not intuitive for humans evaluating a single account.…”

Forma Mentis Networks Reconstruct How Italian High Schoolers and International STEM Experts Perceive Teachers, Students, Scientists, and School

“…Empirical and theoretical research in the cognitive sciences identified these mental representations of knowledge as components of a way more complex system called mental lexicon, a repository of knowledge apt at information acquisition, processing, and use [21]. The recent adoption of network science tools has shown how the large-scale, associative structure of word knowledge in the mental lexicon is highly informative of a wide variety of cognitive processes such as lexical processing [19,22,23,24], learning and cognitive development [25,26,27], text structuring and writing styles [28,29,30,31], creativity [32,33], and expertise levels in specific domains [34,5]. Analogously, forma mentis networks act as approximated reconstructions on the mental constructs built by individuals in their associative mental lexicon, representing their perceptions of the outer world [16,17].…”

Assessing the risks of “infodemics” in response to COVID-19 epidemics

“…In this study, we show that information dynamics tailored to alter individuals' perceptions and, consequently, their behavioral response, is able to drive collective attention 12 towards false 13,14 or inflammatory 15 content, a phenomenon named infodemics [16][17][18][19] , sharing similarities with more traditional epidemics and spreading phenomena [20][21][22] . Contrary to what it could be expected in principle, what this natural experiment reveals is that, on the verge of a threatening global pandemic emergency due to SARS-CoV-2 [23][24][25] , human communication activity is to a significant extent characterized by the intentional production of informational noise and even of misleading or false information 26 .…”