#DebateNight: The Role and Influence of Socialbots on Twitter During the
1st 2016 U.S. Presidential Debate
release_ubb4irsgend43olvccfovmkst4
by
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu and Timothy Graham and Rui Zhang and Yifei Zhang
and Robert Ackland and Lexing Xie
2018
Abstract
Serious concerns have been raised about the role of 'socialbots' in
manipulating public opinion and influencing the outcome of elections by
retweeting partisan content to increase its reach. Here we analyze the role and
influence of socialbots on Twitter by determining how they contribute to
retweet diffusions. We collect a large dataset of tweets during the 1st U.S.
Presidential Debate in 2016 (#DebateNight) and we analyze its 1.5 million users
from three perspectives: user influence, political behavior (partisanship and
engagement) and botness. First, we define a measure of user influence based on
the user's active contributions to information diffusions, i.e. their tweets
and retweets. Given that Twitter does not expose the retweet structure - it
associates all retweets with the original tweet - we model the latent diffusion
structure using only tweet time and user features, and we implement a scalable
novel approach to estimate influence over all possible unfoldings. Next, we use
partisan hashtag analysis to quantify user political polarization and
engagement. Finally, we use the BotOrNot API to measure user botness (the
likelihood of being a bot). We build a two-dimensional "polarization map" that
allows for a nuanced analysis of the interplay between botness, partisanship
and influence. We find that not only social bots are more active on Twitter -
starting more retweet cascades and retweeting more -- but they are 2.5 times
more influential than humans, and more politically engaged. Moreover,
pro-Republican bots are both more influential and more politically engaged than
their pro-Democrat counterparts. However we caution against blanket statements
that software designed to appear human dominates political debates. We find
that many highly influential Twitter users are in fact pro-Democrat and that
most pro-Republican users are mid-influential and likely to be human (low
botness).
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