| Title | Are Bots a Danger for Political Election Campaigns? | |
| Date | Thursday February 22 2018, @10:53AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the are-political-election-campaigns-a-danger? dept. | ||
Normally, autonomous computer programmes known as bots trawl the internet, for example, to help search engines. However, there are also programmes known as social bots which interfere in social media, automatically generating replies or sharing content. They are currently suspected of spreading political propaganda. Scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have investigated the extent to which such autonomous programmes were used on the platform Twitter during the general elections in Japan in 2014. By using methods taken from corpus linguistics, they were able to draw up a case study on the activity patterns of social bots. At the same time, the FAU researchers gained an insight into how computer programmes like these were used, and recognised that nationalistic tendencies had an important role to play in the election, especially in social media. The results of the investigation have been published in the journal Big Data.
Prof. Dr. Fabian Schäfer, chair of Japanese Studies at FAU, was motivated to study the use of social bots after the general election in Japan in 2014. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, led by Shinzō Abe, won the election. Publicly and in the mass media, his election campaign focused predominantly on economic issues. It was a different story in social media. "Our analysis showed that Abe's hidden nationalistic agenda had a very important role to play in these channels," Schäfer explains. "The importance of the hidden agenda in social media is not, however, down to either the prime minister or the LDP itself." Rather, it appears as if social bots were widely used by right-wing internet users, ranging from far-right to more conservative right-wing circles. Prof. Schäfer's initial hypothesis was that the right-wingers used social bots to give indirect online support to Abe's nationalistic agenda, which had slipped into the background during the political campaign.
It seems that future elections will have to deal with such "bots" whether we like it or not. How much influence do you think such bots will have on future election campaigns?
Source: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Related: How great is the influence and risk of social and political 'bots?'
Schäfer Fabian, Evert Stefan, and Heinrich Philipp. Japan's 2014 General Election: Political Bots, Right-wing Internet Activism, and Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's Hidden Nationalist Agenda. Big Data. DOI: 10.1089/big.2017.0049
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