Key Questions:
- Who creates political bots and why?
- Who follows political bots and why?
- What makes some bots “successful”? We define success in terms of political impact and power.
- Can we identify ethical and democratic political uses of artificial intelligence and/or personal data use?
The gist so far:
Most of the work on political bots so far has focused on computational approaches to identifying bots. There seems to be a divide between the bots for “good” and for “bad.” Good might be something like the @CongressEdits Twitter account which posts a tweet every time someone with a US government IP address makes an anonymous edit to Wikipedia. Bad might be something like bots which flood a certain hashtag with tweets in order to make it harder for activists to connect. But we want to understand the human side. Heather Ford, Cornelius Puschmann and I are starting with those “good” bots and trying to sort out who is interacting with them and to what end.
Fenwick McKelvey and I have also done deep dive into the use of political bots in Canada. We are working on plans for analysis in the 2019 federal election in Canada.
Methods:
We are combining content analysis of social media posts and news articles with in-depth interviews.
Are you a bot creator or have you interacted with a political bot (e.g. used information a bot provided)? Let us know!
Elizabeth Dubois 