Social bots distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential election online discussion

Abstract

Social media have been extensively praised for increasing democratic discussion on social issues related to policy and politics. However, what happens when this powerful communication tools are exploited to manipulate online discussion, to change the public perception of political entities, or even to try affecting the outcome of political elections? In this study we investigated how the presence of social media bots, algorithmically driven entities that on the surface appear as legitimate users, affect political discussion around the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. By leveraging state-of-the-art social bot detection algorithms, we uncovered a large fraction of user population that may not be human, accounting for a significant portion of generated content (about one-fifth of the entire conversation). We inferred political partisanships from hashtag adoption, for both humans and bots, and studied spatio-temporal communication, political support dynamics, and influence mechanisms by discovering the level of network embeddedness of the bots. Our findings suggest that the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it, which in turn can potentially alter public opinion and endanger the integrity of the Presidential election.

The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

“…The literature investigating bot activity is concerned with the imitation of human activity on social media by computer scripts (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016). These algorithms, also referred to as "social bots," have been shown to approximate (Woolley & Howard, 2016) and upscale human conduct (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016), often influencing communication exchanges on polarizing topics (Howard & Kollanyi, 2016).…”

Epistemology, methods and theories of communication in the Big Data Era: a critical panorama of social media research

“…The issue emerges mainly through the evidence of influence that these systems have on political-electoral processes (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016), but whose implications have not yet been sufficiently debated on the scientific arena. Following Dusek's (2006) philosophical postulate, according to which all technological means of communication shape social experiences in some measure, it is here suggested the necessity to radically rethink the classic view of an exclusivity of human agency in communicational processes.…”

Education policy research in the big data era: Methodological frontiers, misconceptions, and challenges

“…Social bots are the social media accounts that are operated by algorithms, instead of humans, to automate the content generation and interaction with other human users on social media (Ferrara, Varol, Davis, Menczer, & Flammini, 2016;Kollanyi, Howard, & Wooley, 2016). Recently, social bots have been increasingly used to contribute to and even steer the direction of online discourse on political elections and public policy issues (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016;Ferrara et al, 2016). A prime example is that the automated pro-Trump bots were used more aggressively than pro-Clinton bots during the U.S. presidential debates in 2016, and particularly in the final presidential debate the pro-Trump bots out-produced seven times more traffic on Twitter than the pro-Clinton bots (Kollanyi, Howard, & Wooley, 2016).…”