Journal
SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW
Volume 37, Issue 1, Pages 38-54Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0894439317734157
Keywords
Brexit; Twitter; fake news; sock puppets; retweets cascades; political bots
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Funding
- City, University of London by the Research Pump-Priming Fund
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In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot deployment. Our results move forward the analysis of political bots by showing that Twitterbots can be effective at rapidly generating small- to medium-sized cascades; that the retweeted content comprises user-generated hyperpartisan news, which is not strictly fake news, but whose shelf life is remarkably short; and, finally, that a botnet may be organized in specialized tiers or clusters dedicated to replicating either active users or content generated by other bots.
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