Deflating the Chinese Balloon: Types of Twitter Bots in US-China balloon incident

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian, Carley, Kathleen M.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian
Carley, Kathleen M.
author_facet Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian
Carley, Kathleen M.
contents As digitalization increases, countries employ digital diplomacy, harnessing digital resources to project their desired image. Digital diplomacy also encompasses the interactivity of digital platforms, providing a trove of public opinion that diplomatic agents can collect. Social media bots actively participate in political events through influencing political communication and purporting coordinated narratives to influence human behavior. This article provides a methodology towards identifying three types of bots: General Bots, News Bots and Bridging Bots, then further identify these classes of bots on Twitter during a diplomatic incident involving the United States and China. Using a series of computational methods, this article examines the impact of bots on the topics disseminated, the influence and the use of information maneuvers of bots within the social communication network. Among others, our results observe that all three types of bots are present across the two countries; bots geotagged to the US are generally concerned with the balloon location while those geotagged to China discussed topics related to escalating tensions; and perform different extent of positive narrative and network information maneuvers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_05501
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deflating the Chinese Balloon: Types of Twitter Bots in US-China balloon incident
Ng, Lynnette Hui Xian
Carley, Kathleen M.
Social and Information Networks
As digitalization increases, countries employ digital diplomacy, harnessing digital resources to project their desired image. Digital diplomacy also encompasses the interactivity of digital platforms, providing a trove of public opinion that diplomatic agents can collect. Social media bots actively participate in political events through influencing political communication and purporting coordinated narratives to influence human behavior. This article provides a methodology towards identifying three types of bots: General Bots, News Bots and Bridging Bots, then further identify these classes of bots on Twitter during a diplomatic incident involving the United States and China. Using a series of computational methods, this article examines the impact of bots on the topics disseminated, the influence and the use of information maneuvers of bots within the social communication network. Among others, our results observe that all three types of bots are present across the two countries; bots geotagged to the US are generally concerned with the balloon location while those geotagged to China discussed topics related to escalating tensions; and perform different extent of positive narrative and network information maneuvers.
title Deflating the Chinese Balloon: Types of Twitter Bots in US-China balloon incident
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05501