Utilizing Bots for Sustainable News Business: Understanding Users’ Perspectives of News Bots in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

The move of news audiences to social media has presented a major challenge for news organizations. How to adapt and adjust to this social media environment is an important issue for sustainable news business. News bots are one of the key technologies offered in the current media environment and are widely applied in news production, dissemination, and interaction with audiences. While benefits and concerns coexist about the application of bots in news organizations, the current study aimed to examine how social media users perceive news bots, the factors that affect their acceptance of bots in news organizations, and how this is related to their evaluation of social media news in general. An analysis of the US national survey dataset showed that self-efficacy (confidence in identifying content from a bot) was a successful predictor of news bot acceptance, which in turn resulted in a positive evaluation of social media news in general. In addition, an individual’s perceived prevalence of social media news from bots had an indirect effect on acceptance by increasing self-efficacy. The results are discussed with the aim of providing a better understanding of news audiences in the social media environment, and practical implications for the sustainable news business are suggested.

Disagree? You Must be a Bot! How Beliefs Shape Twitter Profile Perceptions

“…Concerning the acceptance of social bots, Hong and Oh [21] investigated how self-efficacy in identifying social news bots and greater prevalence of social news bots increased users' acceptance. The authors found that with increased self-efficacy in identifying social news bots, social news bots become more acceptable.…”

Towards a Sustainable News Business: Understanding Readers’ Perceptions of Algorithm-Generated News Based on Cultural Conditioning

“…Furthermore, this innovative type of journalism has the potential to create a sustainable business model for news organizations. The consumption of news on digital media tends to be highly selective [4,5], and these changes in the media environment have produced significant challenges for news organizations [5]. From a marketing perspective, scholars encourage news producers to use algorithms to cover simple local reports because they may reduce costs and broaden news audience [2,5].…”

“…The consumption of news on digital media tends to be highly selective [4,5], and these changes in the media environment have produced significant challenges for news organizations [5]. From a marketing perspective, scholars encourage news producers to use algorithms to cover simple local reports because they may reduce costs and broaden news audience [2,5]. Furthermore, news organizations are now experiencing a loss of authority in creating news values and facing audiences' skepticism about the truth.…”

“…Furthermore, news organizations are now experiencing a loss of authority in creating news values and facing audiences' skepticism about the truth. Automation advocates assert that robot journalism may not only be the future of journalism, it may also be beneficial to news media's audiences, since algorithms allow for an unbiased account of facts [5]. Thus, understanding the current status of AI applications in news business and the audiences who use automated news content is a crucial part of achieving sustainable news business.…”

“…Nevertheless, research on algorithm-based, automated, or AI news is still scarce [6]. In its initial stage, research on AI-generated articles or robot journalism in the news media industry mainly focused on the area of technology development and the issue of whether AI-generated articles could replace human-written articles [2,5]. As robot journalism has been further developed, the scope of research has expanded to include various subjects such as the ethics of algorithms, legal issues (e.g., article copyright), potential harm and limitations, and feedback from news readers [2,5,7].…”