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Bots, Elections, and Social Media: A Brief Overview

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Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN))

Abstract

Bots, software-controlled accounts that operate on social media, have been used to manipulate and deceive. We studied the characteristics and activity of bots around major political events, including elections in various countries. In this chapter, we summarize our findings of bot operations in the context of the 2016 and 2018 US Presidential and Midterm elections and the 2017 French Presidential election.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections

  2. 2.

    Botometer: https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/

  3. 3.

    BotSlayer: https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/botslayer/

  4. 4.

    Bot Repository: https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/bot-repository/

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to his collaborators and coauthors on the topics covered in this paper, in particular Adam Badawy, Alessandro Bessi, Ashok Deb, and Luca Luceri, who contributed significantly to three papers widely discussed in this chapter [10, 53, 54].

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  1. USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA, USA

    Emilio Ferrara

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  1. Emilio Ferrara
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  1. Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Kai Shu

  2. College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Suhang Wang

  3. College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Dongwon Lee

  4. Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Huan Liu

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Ferrara, E. (2020). Bots, Elections, and Social Media: A Brief Overview. In: Shu, K., Wang, S., Lee, D., Liu, H. (eds) Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42699-6_6

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