Why Botter: How Pro-Government Bots Fight Opposition in Russia

@article{Stukal2022WhyBH,
  title={Why Botter: How Pro-Government Bots Fight Opposition in Russia},
  author={Denis Stukal and Sergey Sanovich and Richard Bonneau and Joshua A. Tucker},
  journal={American Political Science Review},
  year={2022},
  volume={116},
  pages={843 - 857}
}
There is abundant anecdotal evidence that nondemocratic regimes are harnessing new digital technologies known as social media bots to facilitate policy goals. However, few previous attempts have been made to systematically analyze the use of bots that are aimed at a domestic audience in autocratic regimes. We develop two alternative theoretical frameworks for predicting the use of pro-regime bots: one which focuses on bot deployment in response to offline protest and the other in response to… 
View on Cambridge Press
cambridge.org

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 50 REFERENCES
Turning the virtual tables: Government strategies for addressing online opposition with an application to Russia
TLDR
A novel classification of strategies employed by autocrats to combat hostile activity on the web and in social media in particular is introduced and distinguishes both online from offline response and exerting control from engaging in opinion formation.
Bots sustain and inflate striking opposition in online social systems
TLDR
Analysis of large-scale social data collected during the Catalan referendum for independence on October 1 2017, consisting of nearly 4 millions Twitter posts generated by almost 1 million users, identifies the two polarized groups of Independentists and Constitutionalists and quantify the structural and emotional roles played by social bots.
For Whom the Bot Tolls: A Neural Networks Approach to Measuring Political Orientation of Twitter Bots in Russia
TLDR
A deep neural network classifier is developed that separates pro-regime, anti- Regime, and neutral Russian Twitter bots by their political orientation, and is illustrated by applying it to bots operating in Russian political Twitter from 2015 to 2017.
“Life never matters in the DEMOCRATS MIND”: Examining strategies of retweeted social bots during a mass shooting event
TLDR
While bots amplify conversation about mass shootings, humans were primarily responsible for disseminating bot‐generated content, adding depth to the current understanding of bot strategies and their effectiveness.
Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
This paper investigates online propaganda strategies of the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—Russian “trolls”—during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We assess claims that the IRA sought either to…
Why Do People Join Backlash Protests? Lessons from Turkey
When people learn that demonstrators are being subjected to harsh treatment by the police, sometimes their reaction is to join demonstrations. What explains the potentially mobilizing power of…
Characterizing Bot Networks on Twitter: An Empirical Analysis of Contentious Issues in the Asia-Pacific
TLDR
This paper empirically analyzes bot activity in contentious Twitter conversations using case studies from the Asia-Pacific to derive insights about information operations in three contexts: the senatorial elections in the Philippines, the presidential elections in Indonesia, and the relocation of a military base in Okinawa.
The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies
In the aftermath of recent popular uprisings in dictatorships, many observers argued that information and communication technologies, notably the Internet, played a key role in the mobilization of…
"THE RUSSIANS ARE HACKING MY BRAIN!" investigating Russia's internet research agency twitter tactics during the 2016 United States presidential campaign
The spread of fake news by social bots
TLDR
Analysis of 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand claims on Twitter during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election suggests that curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation.
...
...