Manufacturing conflict or advocating peace? A study of social bots agenda building in the Twitter discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war

Zhao, Bei; Ren, Wujiong; Zhu, Yicheng; Zhang, Hongzhong

doi:10.1080/19331681.2023.2189201

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…The top 50 accounts in each community with the highest CAP were chosen after computing the CAP score for all accounts, all of which were in the highly probable class. Botometer’s result is uncertain and typically bears levels of error (Gallwitz & Kreil, 2022; B. Zhao et al, 2023).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bots Versus Humans: Discursive Activism During the Pandemic in the Iranian Twittersphere

Kermani,

Bayat Makou,

Tafreshi

et al. 2023

Social Media + Society

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This article explores how the pandemic in Iran was discursively framed by automated accounts and human users. While there is a growing body of literature on bot activism, little is known about how bots and humans framed the pandemic in authoritarian regimes. Drawing on networked framing theory, we use both computational and qualitative methods to fill this gap. Our empirical analysis centers on a data set of 4,165,177 tweets collected between 27 January 2020 and 18 April 2020. We found that while anti-regime human users strongly criticized Iran’s regime, pro-regime bots countered with messages emphasizing the sacrifices of medical staff, the strength of Iran, and the failings of Western governments in managing the crisis. Our results suggest that Persian Twitter human users were largely against the regime, while the regime employed bots extensively to maintain balance. Human users used sarcasm, while pro-regime bots invoked religious and revolutionary sentiments metaphorically to defend the regime. By focusing on a relatively unexplored context, this article adds to the growing literature on bot activism.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…B. Zhao et al (2023), who studied the Twitter discussion of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, argued that social bots have distinct or even opposing effects on agenda-setting in national/regional discussions.…”

Section: Bot Activism During the Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots Versus Humans: Discursive Activism During the Pandemic in the Iranian Twittersphere

Kermani,

Bayat Makou,

Tafreshi

et al. 2023

Social Media + Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For instance, Parmelee (2014) found that tweets from political leaders could affect first-and second-level agenda building. In another study, Zhao et al (2023) investigated how social bots build the agenda for Russia-Ukraine war. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of agenda building, this study seeks to investigate how external factors affect third-level agenda building, that is, the network agenda in news coverage, by virtue of a transnational comparative approach.…”

Section: Network Agenda Buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building network agenda in China-U.S. trade conflict news: Transnational comparative study across China, the United States, Singapore and Ireland

Liu

2024

Newspaper Research Journal

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Drawing from agenda building theory, this study explores the impact of factors like journalistic culture, national stance and conflict periods on the similarity and dissimilarity of network agendas in China-U.S. trade conflict news across China, the United States, Singapore and Ireland. Findings revealed significant correlations in network agendas across countries, albeit with disparities between China and the United States. Notably, the correlation weakened in both Chinese and U.S. news following the trade war’s eruption.

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Deflating the Chinese balloon: types of Twitter bots in US-China balloon incident

Ng,

Carley

2023

EPJ Data Sci.

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As digitalization increases, countries employ digital diplomacy, harnessing digital resources to project their desired image. Digital diplomacy also encompasses the interactivity of digital platforms, providing a trove of public opinion that diplomatic agents can collect. Social media bots actively participate in political events through influencing political communication and purporting coordinated narratives to influence human behavior. This article provides a methodology towards identifying three types of bots: General Bots, News Bots and Bridging Bots, then further identify these classes of bots on Twitter during a diplomatic incident involving the United States and China. In the balloon incident that occurred in early 2023, where a balloon believed to have originated from China is spotted across the US airspace. Both countries have differing opinions on the function and eventual handling of the balloon. Using a series of computational methods, this article examines the impact of bots on the topics disseminated, the influence and the use of information maneuvers of bots within the social communication network. Among others, our results observe that all three types of bots are present across the two countries; bots geotagged to the US are generally concerned with the balloon location while those geotagged to China discussed topics related to escalating tensions; and perform different extent of positive narrative and network information maneuvers. The broader implications of our work towards policy making is the systematic identification of the type of bot users and their properties across country lines, enabling the evaluation of how automated agents are being deployed to disseminate narratives and the nature of narratives propagated, and therefore reflects the image that the country is being projected as on social media; as well as the perception of political issues by social media users.

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Manufacturing conflict or advocating peace? A study of social bots agenda building in the Twitter discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war

Cited by 5 publications

References 49 publications

Bots Versus Humans: Discursive Activism During the Pandemic in the Iranian Twittersphere

Bots Versus Humans: Discursive Activism During the Pandemic in the Iranian Twittersphere

Building network agenda in China-U.S. trade conflict news: Transnational comparative study across China, the United States, Singapore and Ireland

Deflating the Chinese balloon: types of Twitter bots in US-China balloon incident

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