Are they bots? Automatization on social mediaSocial media automation during Chile’s 2017 presidential campaign in Chile 2017
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7764/cdi.44.1629Keywords:
bots, propaganda, elections, social media, democracyAbstract
This research sought for automated strategies of creation or diffusion of electoral propaganda in social media during Chile’s 2017 presidential campaign. We collected and analyzed almost 2 million tweets that utilized election hashtags or were linked to one of the candidates or their campaigns; we also collected and analyzed 2,927 official Facebook posts of the candidates and 453,668 comments. While on Facebook the behavior was relatively normal, we discovered that on Twitter there were digital brigades who act autonomously in astroturfing campaigning during the first round of the election.
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Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A., & Yang, Y. (2018). The Strength of Peripheral Networks: Negotiating Attention and Meaning in Complex Media Ecologies. Journal of Communication, 68(4), 659-684. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy032
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Gallacher, J. D., Kaminska, M., Kollanyi, B., & Howard, P. N. (2017). Junk News and Bots during the 2017 UK General Election: What Are UK Voters Sharing Over Twitter? Technical report, Data Memo 2017.5. Project on Computational Propaganda, Oxford. Retrieved from https://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/06/Junk-News-and-Bots-during-the-2017-UK-General-Election.pdf
Glowacki, M., Narayanan, V., Maynard, S., Hirsch, G., Kollanyi, B., Neudert, L., … & Barash, V. (2018, June 29). News and Political Information Consumption in Mexico: Mapping the 2018 Mexican Presidential Election on Twitter and Facebook. The Computational Propaganda Project. Retrieved from http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/working-papers/mexico2018/
Habermas, J. (2006). Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research. Communication Theory, 16(4), 411-426. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x
Howard, P. N. (2015). Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Howard, P. N., Savage, S., Flores Saviaga, C., Toxtli, C., & Monroy-Hernandez, A. (2017). Social Media, Civic Engagement, and the Slacktivism Hypothesis: Lessons From Mexico’s “El Bronco”. Journal of International Affairs, 70(1), 55-73. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/90012597
Howard, P. N., Woolley, S., & Calo, R. (2018). Algorithms, bots, and political communication in the US 2016 election: The challenge of automated political communication for election law and administration. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 15(2), 81-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1448735
Hurlock, J. & Wilson, M. L. (2011, July). Searching Twitter: Separating the Tweet from the Chaff. In Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 161-168). AAAI Publications. Retrieved from https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewPaper/2819
Hwang, T. (2017). Dealing with Disinformation: Evaluating the Case for CDA 230 Amendment (SSRN Scholarly Paper Nº ID 3089442). Retrieved from Social Science Research Network website: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3089442
La Tercera. (2017a, November 16). #EleccionesLT ¿Cómo funcionará la Ley Seca el día de las votaciones? Acá te lo explicamos #EleccionesChile (#EleccionesLT How will alcohol prohibition work on voting day? We explain it to you #EleccionesChile) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/latercera/status/931372075465433088
La Tercera. (2017b, November 14). #EleccionesLT | ¿Vas a votar y no sabes hasta qué hora puedes hacerlo? Acá te contamos #EleccionesChile (#EleccionesLT | You are going to vote and do not know until what time can you do it? We tell you! #EleccionesChile) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/latercera/status/930408641575948288
Noble. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.
Noelle-Neumann, E. (1984). The spiral of silence: public opinion, our social skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Malden: Polity Press.
Pariser, E. (2012). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing what We Read and how We Think. London: Penguin Books.
Persily, N. (2017). The 2016 U.S. Election: Can Democracy Survive the Internet? Journal of Democracy, 28(2), 64-76. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0025
Puyosa, I. (2017). Bots políticos en Twitter en la campaña presidencial #Ecuador2017 (Political Bots on Twitter in #Ecuador2017 Presidential Campaigns). Contratexto, (027), 39-60. https://doi.org/10.26439/contratexto.2017.027.002
Saa, M. (2017, November 13). Carolina Goic a la presidencia! Y en el distrito 10 Nicolás Muñoz debe ser diputado! Hagamos las cosas bien con ética y responsabilidad #GanemosConGoic #YoMeAtrevo #PorLoJusto (Carolina Goic for president! And in the 10th district, Nicolás Muñoz must be a deputy! Let’s do things well with ethics and responsibility #GanemosConGoic #YoMeAtrevo #PorLoJusto) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ManuelSaa5/status/930162386434174977
Santana, L. E. (2015). From the Village to the Global Village: An Alternative Model of Collective Action in Digital Media Networks (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/33130
Savage, S. & Monroy-Hernández, A. (2015). Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement’s Online Audience. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW ’15 (pp. 724-733). New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675295
Sence Chile. (2017, November 5). Participar en las #Elecciones2017 es la única manera de hacer valer tu opinión. ¡No te restes, súmate! (Participating in #Elecciones2017 is the only way to assert your opinion. Don’t stay apart, come on!) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/SenceChile/status/927289421115936770
Servicio Electoral de Chile. (2017). Manual de Consulta de Campaña y Propaganda Electoral 2017 (Campaign and Electoral Propaganda 2017 Handbook) (PDF file). Retrieved from https://www.servel.cl/wpcontent/uploads/2017/08/Manual_de_Propaganda_Electoral_21-08-2017.pdf
Servicio Electoral de Chile. (2018). Ingresos y gastos de candidatos (Candidate’s earnings and spending). Retrieved from https://www.servel.cl/ingresos-y-gastos-de-candidatos/
Tufekci, Z. (2016). As the pirates become CEOs: The closing of the open internet. Daedalus, 145(1), 65–78. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00366
Valenzuela, S., Arriagada, A., Somma, N., & Scherman, A. (2016). Social Media in Latin America: Deepening or Bridging Gaps in Protest Participation? Online Information Review, 40(5), 695-711. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-11-2015-0347
Valenzuela, S., Piña, M., & Ramírez, J. (2017). Behavioral Effects of Framing on Social Media Users: How Conflict, Economic, Human Interest, and Morality Frames Drive News Sharing. Journal of Communication, 67(5), 803-826. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12325
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559
Allcott, H. & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31(2), 211-236. Retrieved from https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211
Arnaudo, D. (2017). Computational Propaganda in Brazil: Social Bots During Elections. Working Paper No. 2017.8. Oxford: Project on Computational Propaganda. Retrieved from https://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/politicalbots/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/06/Comprop-Brazil-1.pdf
Arroba Rimassa, J., Llopis, F., Muñoz, R., & Gutiérrez, Y. (2018). Using the Twitter social network as a predictor in the political decision. Paper presented at CICLing 2018, 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, Hanoi, Vietnam. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10045/76464
Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. A. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130-1132. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bennett, W. L. & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122-139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317
Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A., & Yang, Y. (2018). The Strength of Peripheral Networks: Negotiating Attention and Meaning in Complex Media Ecologies. Journal of Communication, 68(4), 659-684. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy032
Blondel, V., Guillaume, J., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E.(2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2008(10). https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008
Bond, R. & Messing, S. (2015). Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook. American Political Science Review, 109(1), 62-78. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000525
Bradshaw, S. & Howard, P. N. (2017). Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved from https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cef7e8d9-27bf-4ea5-9fd6-855209b3e1f6
Bradshaw, S. & Howard, P. N. (2018). Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved from http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/sites/93/2018/07/ct2018.pdf
Braga, S. & Carlomagno, M. (2018). Eleições como de costume? Uma análise longitudinal das mudanças provocadas nas campanhas eleitorais brasileiras pelas tecnologias digitais (1998-2016) (Elections as usual? longitudinal analysis of the changes caused by digital technologies in Brazilian electoral campaigns (1998-2016)). Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política, (26), 7-62. https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-335220182601
Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: politics and power. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759477.001.0001
Filer, T. & Fredheim, R. (2017). Popular with the Robots: Accusation and Automation in the Argentine Presidential Elections, 2015. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 30(3), 259-274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-016-9233-7
Forelle, M., Howard, P. N., Monroy-Hernandez, A., & Savage, S. (2015). Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.07109. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07109
Gallacher, J. D., Kaminska, M., Kollanyi, B., & Howard, P. N. (2017). Junk News and Bots during the 2017 UK General Election: What Are UK Voters Sharing Over Twitter? Technical report, Data Memo 2017.5. Project on Computational Propaganda, Oxford. Retrieved from https://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/06/Junk-News-and-Bots-during-the-2017-UK-General-Election.pdf
Glowacki, M., Narayanan, V., Maynard, S., Hirsch, G., Kollanyi, B., Neudert, L., … & Barash, V. (2018, June 29). News and Political Information Consumption in Mexico: Mapping the 2018 Mexican Presidential Election on Twitter and Facebook. The Computational Propaganda Project. Retrieved from http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/working-papers/mexico2018/
Habermas, J. (2006). Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research. Communication Theory, 16(4), 411-426. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x
Howard, P. N. (2015). Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Howard, P. N., Savage, S., Flores Saviaga, C., Toxtli, C., & Monroy-Hernandez, A. (2017). Social Media, Civic Engagement, and the Slacktivism Hypothesis: Lessons From Mexico’s “El Bronco”. Journal of International Affairs, 70(1), 55-73. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/90012597
Howard, P. N., Woolley, S., & Calo, R. (2018). Algorithms, bots, and political communication in the US 2016 election: The challenge of automated political communication for election law and administration. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 15(2), 81-93. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1448735
Hurlock, J. & Wilson, M. L. (2011, July). Searching Twitter: Separating the Tweet from the Chaff. In Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 161-168). AAAI Publications. Retrieved from https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewPaper/2819
Hwang, T. (2017). Dealing with Disinformation: Evaluating the Case for CDA 230 Amendment (SSRN Scholarly Paper Nº ID 3089442). Retrieved from Social Science Research Network website: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3089442
La Tercera. (2017a, November 16). #EleccionesLT ¿Cómo funcionará la Ley Seca el día de las votaciones? Acá te lo explicamos #EleccionesChile (#EleccionesLT How will alcohol prohibition work on voting day? We explain it to you #EleccionesChile) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/latercera/status/931372075465433088
La Tercera. (2017b, November 14). #EleccionesLT | ¿Vas a votar y no sabes hasta qué hora puedes hacerlo? Acá te contamos #EleccionesChile (#EleccionesLT | You are going to vote and do not know until what time can you do it? We tell you! #EleccionesChile) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/latercera/status/930408641575948288
Noble. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.
Noelle-Neumann, E. (1984). The spiral of silence: public opinion, our social skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Malden: Polity Press.
Pariser, E. (2012). The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing what We Read and how We Think. London: Penguin Books.
Persily, N. (2017). The 2016 U.S. Election: Can Democracy Survive the Internet? Journal of Democracy, 28(2), 64-76. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2017.0025
Puyosa, I. (2017). Bots políticos en Twitter en la campaña presidencial #Ecuador2017 (Political Bots on Twitter in #Ecuador2017 Presidential Campaigns). Contratexto, (027), 39-60. https://doi.org/10.26439/contratexto.2017.027.002
Saa, M. (2017, November 13). Carolina Goic a la presidencia! Y en el distrito 10 Nicolás Muñoz debe ser diputado! Hagamos las cosas bien con ética y responsabilidad #GanemosConGoic #YoMeAtrevo #PorLoJusto (Carolina Goic for president! And in the 10th district, Nicolás Muñoz must be a deputy! Let’s do things well with ethics and responsibility #GanemosConGoic #YoMeAtrevo #PorLoJusto) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ManuelSaa5/status/930162386434174977
Santana, L. E. (2015). From the Village to the Global Village: An Alternative Model of Collective Action in Digital Media Networks (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/33130
Savage, S. & Monroy-Hernández, A. (2015). Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement’s Online Audience. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW ’15 (pp. 724-733). New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675295
Sence Chile. (2017, November 5). Participar en las #Elecciones2017 es la única manera de hacer valer tu opinión. ¡No te restes, súmate! (Participating in #Elecciones2017 is the only way to assert your opinion. Don’t stay apart, come on!) (Twitter post). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/SenceChile/status/927289421115936770
Servicio Electoral de Chile. (2017). Manual de Consulta de Campaña y Propaganda Electoral 2017 (Campaign and Electoral Propaganda 2017 Handbook) (PDF file). Retrieved from https://www.servel.cl/wpcontent/uploads/2017/08/Manual_de_Propaganda_Electoral_21-08-2017.pdf
Servicio Electoral de Chile. (2018). Ingresos y gastos de candidatos (Candidate’s earnings and spending). Retrieved from https://www.servel.cl/ingresos-y-gastos-de-candidatos/
Tufekci, Z. (2016). As the pirates become CEOs: The closing of the open internet. Daedalus, 145(1), 65–78. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00366
Valenzuela, S., Arriagada, A., Somma, N., & Scherman, A. (2016). Social Media in Latin America: Deepening or Bridging Gaps in Protest Participation? Online Information Review, 40(5), 695-711. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-11-2015-0347
Valenzuela, S., Piña, M., & Ramírez, J. (2017). Behavioral Effects of Framing on Social Media Users: How Conflict, Economic, Human Interest, and Morality Frames Drive News Sharing. Journal of Communication, 67(5), 803-826. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12325
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559
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2020-07-24
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Santana, L. E., & Huerta Cánepa, G. (2020). Are they bots? Automatization on social mediaSocial media automation during Chile’s 2017 presidential campaign in Chile 2017. Cuadernos.Info, (44), 61–77. https://doi.org/10.7764/cdi.44.1629
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