Download or read book Social Bots Role in Online Political Communication written by Abeer Ibtisam Aziz and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2016, the US elections and Brexit changed the perception and understanding of how social media platforms could influence political outcomes. This has been complemented by the advancement in automation and data processing. This paper studies the influence of bots on online information diffusion and political discourse around the 2021 German Federal Elections. It examines the behavior of social bots in online political communication, in particular, whether the presence of bots leads to an amplification of the Tweet volume of humans. Using Twitter data pertaining to the German political sphere over 6 weeks till election day, I find 6% of the tweets originated from bot accounts. The impact of the bots is investigated through time series analysis. The key findings are that the bots' tweet volume significantly impacts the human tweet volume, especially when the tweets hold the same inclination towards a political party. The influence is not always observed for across-inclination tweet volumes of bots on humans. Furthermore, employing impulse response functions, the impact is observed to be positive, indicating an amplification effect of bots' tweeting activity.

Download or read book Social Media and Democracy written by Nathaniel Persily and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

Download or read book Computational Propaganda written by Samuel C. Woolley and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Campaigns made up of bots, fake accounts, and trolls can be coordinated by one person, or a small group of people, to give the illusion of large-scale consensus. Some political regimes use political bots to silence opponents and to push official state messaging, to sway the vote during elections, and to defame critics, human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists. This book argues that such automation and platform manipulation, amounts to a new political communications mechanism that Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Noward call "computational propaganda." This differs from older styles of propaganda in that it uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks while it actively learns from and mimicks real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. This book includes cases of computational propaganda from nine countries (both democratic and authoritarian) and four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms and usage in different types of political processes (elections, referenda, and during political crises).

Download or read book Bots written by Nick Monaco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bots – automated software applications programmed to perform tasks online – have become a feature of our everyday lives, from helping us navigate online systems to assisting us with online shopping. Yet, despite enabling internet users, bots are increasingly associated with disinformation and concerning political intervention. In this ground-breaking book, Monaco and Woolley offer the first comprehensive overview of the history of bots, tracing their varied applications throughout the past sixty years and bringing to light the astounding influence these computer programs have had on how humans understand reality, communicate with each other, and wield power. Drawing upon the authors' decade of experience in the field, this book examines the role bots play in politics, social life, business, and artificial intelligence. Despite bots being a fundamental part of the web since the early 1990s, the authors reveal how the socially oriented ones continue to play an integral role in online communication globally, especially as our daily lives become increasingly automated. This timely book is essential reading for students and scholars in Media and Communication Studies, Sociology, Politics, and Computer Science, as well as general readers with an interest in technology and public affairs.

Download or read book Socialbots and Their Friends written by Robert W. Gehl and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many users of the Internet are aware of bots: automated programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other bots, socialbots are built to appear human. While a weatherbot will tell you if it's sunny and a spambot will incessantly peddle Viagra, socialbots will ask you questions, have conversations, like your posts, retweet you, and become your friend. All the while, if they're well-programmed, you won't know that you're tweeting and friending with a robot. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot deserve rights? Who pulls the strings of these bots? Who has the right to know what about them? What does it mean to be intelligent? What does it mean to be a friend? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.

Download or read book Computational Propaganda written by Samuel C. Woolley and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Campaigns made up of bots, fake accounts, and trolls can be coordinated by one person, or a small group of people, to give the illusion of large-scale consensus. Some political regimes use political bots to silence opponents and to push official state messaging, to sway the vote during elections, and to defame critics, human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists. This book argues that such automation and platform manipulation, amounts to a new political communications mechanism that Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Noward call "computational propaganda." This differs from older styles of propaganda in that it uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks while it actively learns from and mimicks real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. This book includes cases of computational propaganda from nine countries (both democratic and authoritarian) and four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms and usage in different types of political processes (elections, referenda, and during political crises).

Download or read book Tweeting to Power written by Jason Gainous and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using theory and data, Gainous and Wagner illustrate how online social media is bypassing traditional media and creating new forums for the exchange of political information and campaigning.

Download or read book Invasion of the Soical Bots written by Simon Hegelich and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Data Science For Cyber security written by Nicholas A Heard and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyber-security is a matter of rapidly growing importance in industry and government. This book provides insight into a range of data science techniques for addressing these pressing concerns.The application of statistical and broader data science techniques provides an exciting growth area in the design of cyber defences. Networks of connected devices, such as enterprise computer networks or the wider so-called Internet of Things, are all vulnerable to misuse and attack, and data science methods offer the promise to detect such behaviours from the vast collections of cyber traffic data sources that can be obtained. In many cases, this is achieved through anomaly detection of unusual behaviour against understood statistical models of normality.This volume presents contributed papers from an international conference of the same name held at Imperial College. Experts from the field have provided their latest discoveries and review state of the art technologies.

Download or read book Journalism fake news disinformation written by Ireton, Cherilyn and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Research Exposed written by Eszter Hargittai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The era of digital communication provides endless opportunities for the collection and analysis of social data in novel ways. It also presents new and unanticipated challenges, as researchers are often inventing elements of their methodologies on the fly or studying a phenomenon or media platform for the first time. Research Exposed offers in-depth, behind-the-scenes accounts of doing empirical social science in this new paradigm. Through firsthand descriptions of innovative research projects, it shares lessons learned from over a dozen scholars’ cutting-edge work. These candid accounts describe what can go wrong when pioneering new genres of research and how such difficulties can be overcome, giving both big-picture reflection and actionable advice. The chapters discuss a variety of methods, ranging from the completely novel to the use of more traditional approaches in the digital context, and cover research questions relevant to a range of disciplines, including sociology, political science, communication, information studies, and anthropology. By focusing attention on the concrete details seldom discussed in final project write-ups or traditional research guides, Research Exposed helps equip junior and senior scholars alike with essential information that is all too often left with no outlet for sharing. It offers important insights into how empirical social science research can be both innovative and rigorous when dealing with the opportunities and challenges presented by digital media.

Download or read book Social Bots Distort the 2016 US Presidential Election Online Discussion written by Alessandro Bessi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social media have been extensively praised for increasing democratic discussion on social issues related to policy and politics. However, what happens when this powerful communication tools are exploited to manipulate online discussion, to change the public perception of political entities, or even to try affecting the outcome of political elections? In this study we investigated how the presence of social media bots, algorithmically driven entities that on the surface appear as legitimate users, affect political discussion around the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. By leveraging state-of-the-art social bot detection algorithms, we uncovered a large fraction of user population that may not be human, accounting for a significant portion of generated content (about one-fifth of the entire conversation). We inferred political partisanships from hashtag adoption, for both humans and bots, and studied spatio-temporal communication, political support dynamics, and influence mechanisms by discovering the level of network embeddedness of the bots. Our findings suggest that the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it, which in turn can potentially alter public opinion and endanger the integrity of the Presidential election.

Download or read book The Citizen Marketer written by Joel Penney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture. While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles -- particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle -- some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation.

Download or read book Pax Technica written by Philip N. Howard and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we fear or welcome the internet’s evolution? The “internet of things” is the rapidly growing network of everyday objects—eyeglasses, cars, thermostats—made smart with sensors and internet addresses. Soon we will live in a pervasive yet invisible network of everyday objects that communicate with one another. In this original and provocative book, Philip N. Howard envisions a new world order emerging from this great transformation in the technologies around us. Howard calls this new era a Pax Technica. He looks to a future of global stability built upon device networks with immense potential for empowering citizens, making government transparent, and broadening information access. Howard cautions, however, that privacy threats are enormous, as is the potential for social control and political manipulation. Drawing on evidence from around the world, he illustrates how the internet of things can be used to repress and control people. Yet he also demonstrates that if we actively engage with the governments and businesses building the internet of things, we have a chance to build a new kind of internet—and a more open society.

Download or read book Social Computing and Social Media Design Ethics User Behavior and Social Network Analysis written by Gabriele Meiselwitz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set LNCS 12194 and 12195 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2020, held as part of the 22nd International Conference, HCI International 2020, which was planned to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The total of 1439 papers and 238 posters have been accepted for publication in the HCII 2020 proceedings from a total of 6326 submissions. SCSM 2020 includes a total of 93 papers which are organized in topical sections named: Design Issues in Social Computing, Ethics and Misinformation in Social Media, User Behavior and Social Network Analysis, Participation and Collaboration in Online Communities, Social Computing and User Experience, Social Media Marketing and Consumer Experience, Social Computing for Well-Being, Learning, and Entertainment.

Download or read book Citizen Participation and Political Communication in a Digital World written by Alex Frame and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The arrival of the participatory web 2.0 has been hailed by many as a media revolution, bringing with it new tools and possibilities for direct political action. Through specialised online platforms, mainstream social media or blogs, citizens in many countries are increasingly seeking to have their voices heard online, whether it is to lobby, to support or to complain about their elected representatives. Politicians, too, are adopting "new media" in specific ways, though they are often criticised for failing to seize the full potential of online tools to enter into dialogue with their electorates. Bringing together perspectives from around the world, this volume examines emerging forms of citizen participation in the face of the evolving logics of political communication, and provides a unique and original focus on the gap which exists between political uses of digital media by the politicians and by the people they represent.

Download or read book Liberation Technology written by Larry Diamond and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberation Technology brings together cutting-edge scholarship from scholars and practitioners at the forefront of this burgeoning field of study. An introductory section defines the debate with a foundational piece on liberation technology and is then followed by essays discussing the popular dichotomy of liberation'' versus "control" with regard to the Internet and the sociopolitical dimensions of such controls. Additional chapters delve into the cases of individual countries: China, Egypt, Iran, and Tunisia.