Aldayel Abeer, Magdy Walid
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Soc Netw Anal Min. 2022;12(1):30. doi: 10.1007/s13278-022-00858-z. Epub 2022 Feb 4.
There is a rising concern with social bots that imitate humans and manipulate opinions on social media. Current studies on assessing the overall effect of bots on social media users mainly focus on evaluating the diffusion of discussions on social networks by bots. Yet, these studies do not confirm the relationship between bots and users' stances. This study fills in the gap by analyzing if these bots are part of the signals that formulated social media users' stances towards controversial topics. We analyze users' online interactions that are predictive to their stances and identify the bots within these interactions. We applied our analysis on a dataset of more than 4000 Twitter users who expressed a stance on seven different topics. We analyzed those users' direct interactions and indirect exposures with more than 19 million accounts. We identify the bot accounts for supporting/against stances, and compare them to other types of accounts, such as the accounts of influential and famous users. Our analysis showed that bot interactions with users who had specific stances were minimal when compared to the influential accounts. Nevertheless, we found that the presence of bots was still connected to users' stances, especially in an indirect manner, as users are exposed to the content of the bots they follow, rather than by directly interacting with them by retweeting, mentioning, or replying.
人们越来越关注模仿人类并在社交媒体上操纵舆论的社交机器人。当前关于评估机器人对社交媒体用户的总体影响的研究主要集中在评估机器人在社交网络上讨论的传播情况。然而，这些研究并未证实机器人与用户立场之间的关系。本研究通过分析这些机器人是否是构成社交媒体用户对争议性话题立场的信号的一部分来填补这一空白。我们分析了对用户立场具有预测性的在线互动，并识别出这些互动中的机器人。我们将分析应用于一个包含4000多名在七个不同话题上表达了立场的推特用户的数据集。我们分析了这些用户与超过1900万个账户的直接互动和间接接触。我们识别出支持/反对立场的机器人账户，并将它们与其他类型的账户进行比较，比如有影响力的知名用户的账户。我们的分析表明，与有影响力的账户相比，机器人与持有特定立场的用户之间的互动很少。然而，我们发现机器人的存在仍然与用户的立场有关，尤其是以一种间接的方式，因为用户会接触到他们关注的机器人的内容，而不是通过转发、提及或回复直接与它们互动。
