Bruno Matteo, Lambiotte Renaud, Saracco Fabio
IMT School for Advanced Studies, P.zza S. Francesco 19, 55100 Lucca, Italy.
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG Oxford, UK.
EPJ Data Sci. 2022;11(1):17. doi: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00330-0. Epub 2022 Mar 22.
Online Social Networks (OSNs) offer new means for political communications that have quickly begun to play crucial roles in political campaigns, due to their pervasiveness and communication speed. However, the OSN environment is quite slippery and hides potential risks: many studies presented evidence about the presence of d/misinformation campaigns and malicious activities by genuine or automated users, putting at severe risk the efficiency of online and offline political campaigns. This phenomenon is particularly evident during crucial political events, as political elections. In the present paper, we provide a comprehensive description of the networks of interactions among users and bots during the UK elections of 2019. In particular, we focus on the polarised discussion about Brexit on Twitter, analysing a data set made of more than 10 millions tweets posted for over a month. We found that the presence of automated accounts infected the debate particularly in the days before the UK national elections, in which we find a steep increase of bots in the discussion; in the days after the election day, their incidence returned to values similar to the ones observed few weeks before the elections. On the other hand, we found that the number of suspended users (i.e. accounts that were removed by the platform for some violation of the Twitter policy) remained constant until the election day, after which it reached significantly higher values. Remarkably, after the TV debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, we observed the injection of a large number of novel bots whose behaviour is markedly different from that of pre-existing ones. Finally, we explored the bots' political orientation, finding that their activity is spread across the whole political spectrum, although in different proportions, and we studied the different usage of hashtags and URLs by automated accounts and suspended users, targeting the formation of common narratives in different sides of the debate.
在线社交网络（OSN）为政治沟通提供了新手段，由于其普及性和传播速度，这些手段很快就在政治竞选活动中开始发挥关键作用。然而，OSN环境相当复杂，隐藏着潜在风险：许多研究提供了证据，证明存在虚假/错误信息传播活动以及真实用户或自动化用户的恶意活动，这严重危及线上和线下政治竞选活动的效率。这种现象在关键政治事件期间，如政治选举时，尤为明显。在本文中，我们全面描述了2019年英国选举期间用户与机器人之间的互动网络。特别是，我们聚焦于推特上关于脱欧的两极分化讨论，分析了一个由一个多月内发布的超过1000万条推文组成的数据集。我们发现，自动化账户的存在尤其在英国全国选举前几天影响了辩论，我们发现在讨论中机器人数量急剧增加；在选举日后的几天里，它们的发生率恢复到与选举前几周观察到的数值相似。另一方面，我们发现被暂停使用的用户数量（即因违反推特政策而被平台移除的账户）在选举日前一直保持不变，选举日后则大幅上升。值得注意的是，在鲍里斯·约翰逊和杰里米·科尔宾的电视辩论之后，我们观察到大量新型机器人的注入，其行为与先前存在的机器人明显不同。最后，我们探究了机器人的政治倾向，发现它们的活动分布在整个政治光谱中，尽管比例不同，并且我们研究了自动化账户和被暂停使用的用户对标签和网址的不同使用情况，以针对辩论不同方形成共同叙事。
