Source-linked AI summary
Bots, #StrongerIn, and #Brexit: Computational Propaganda during the UK-EU Referendum
Philip N. Howard, Bence Kollanyi
TL;DR
The study examines how political bots participated in Twitter conversations during the UK referendum on EU membership. Analyzing tweeting patterns among human users and bots, it finds bots played a small but strategic role, with leave-associated hashtags dominating and less than 1 percent of accounts generating almost a third of messages.
Problem
The study asks how political bots participated in UK referendum conversations, amid limited understanding of their role and users’ ability to distinguish automated activity.
Method
The study analyzes Twitter tweeting patterns and automation levels across accounts participating in the StrongerIn-Brexit hashtag conversation.
Results
Political bots played a small but strategic role: leave-associated hashtags dominated, perspectives used different automation levels, and less than 1 percent of accounts generated almost a third of messages.
Takeaways & Limitations
The referendum conversation featured uneven automation and disproportionate content production by highly active accounts, especially around leave-associated messaging.
Takeaways & Limitations
The hashtag-based dataset excludes contributions without the selected hashtags and some newer retweets represented through comment-and-URL formats.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Bots are social media accounts that automate interaction with other users, and they are active on the StrongerIn-Brexit conversation happening over Twitter. These automated scripts generate content through these platforms and then interact with people. Political bots are automated accounts that are particularly active on public policy issues, elections, and political crises. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots during the UK referendum on EU membership, we analyze the tweeting patterns for both human users and bots. We find that political bots have a small but strategic role in the referendum conversations: (1) the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates, (2) different perspectives on the issue utilize different levels of automation, and (3) less than 1 percent of sampled accounts generate almost a third of all the messages.