Automating power: Social bot interference in global politics

Authors

  • Samuel C. Woolley University of Washington

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i4.6161

Keywords:

Automation, Bot, Digital Politics, Social Bot, Political Bot

Abstract

Over the last several years political actors worldwide have begun harnessing the digital power of social bots — software programs designed to mimic human social media users on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Increasingly, politicians, militaries, and government-contracted firms use these automated actors in online attempts to manipulate public opinion and disrupt organizational communication. Politicized social bots — here ‘political bots’ — are used to massively boost politicians’ follower levels on social media sites in attempts to generate false impressions of popularity. They are programmed to actively and automatically flood news streams with spam during political crises, elections, and conflicts in order to interrupt the efforts of activists and political dissidents who publicize and organize online. They are used by regimes to send out sophisticated computational propaganda. This paper conducts a content analysis of available media articles on political bots in order to build an event dataset of global political bot deployment that codes for usage, capability, and history. This information is then analyzed, generating a global outline of this phenomenon. This outline seeks to explain the variety of political bot-oriented strategies and presents details crucial to building understandings of these automated software actors in the humanities, social and computer sciences.

Author Biography

Samuel C. Woolley, University of Washington

Samuel C. Woolley is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communications at the University of Washington (UW). His research is primarily concerned with digital media, politics, and culture. He is the project manager of the National Science Foundation supported ‘Political Bots Research Project’ at UW and project manager of the European Research Council supported ‘Computational Propaganda Research Project’ at the Oxford Internet Institute. He is a researcher on the Digital Activism Research Project and research and undergraduate learning community coordinater at the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement.

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Published

2016-03-10

How to Cite

Woolley, S. C. (2016). Automating power: Social bot interference in global politics. First Monday, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i4.6161