• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
  • Research
  • Conference
    • CCS/Italy 2019
    • CCS/Italy 2023
  • Jobs
  • Events
  • Members
    • Labs
    • Executive Board
    • Local Coordinators
    • All
  • Contact

CSS/Italy

Italian Chapter of Complex Systems Society

January 8, 2019 research

Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systems

Massimo Stella, Emilio Ferrara, and Manlio De Domenico
PNAS 115, 12435 (2018)
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1803470115

Societies are complex systems, which tend to polarize into subgroups of individuals with dramatically opposite perspectives. This phenomenon is reflected—and often amplified—in online social networks, where, however, humans are no longer the only players and coexist alongside with social bots—that is, software-controlled accounts. Analyzing large-scale social data collected during the Catalan referendum for independence on October 1, 2017, consisting of nearly 4 millions Twitter posts generated by almost 1 million users, we identify the two polarized groups of Independentists and Constitutionalists and quantify the structural and emotional roles played by social bots. We show that bots act from peripheral areas of the social system to target influential humans of both groups, bombarding Independentists with violent contents, increasing their exposure to negative and inflammatory narratives, and exacerbating social conflict online. Our findings stress the importance of developing countermeasures to unmask these forms of automated social manipulation.

 

Categories: research Tags: complex networks, information diffusion, misinformation, social bots

Previous Post: « Postdoctoral positions at the Center for Complexity and Biosystems
Next Post: Technologist position @CoMuNe Lab in Trento »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Newsletter

Tags

blockchain cognitive complex networks complex systems complex system society cortex data science digital humanities disease Dottorato ecosystems dynamics; diauxic shifts; competitive-exclusion principle energy energy markets epidemiology genetics graphene infectious diseases information diffusion interdependent systems Master misinformation mobility multilayer networks networks network science neuroscience open positions PhD position Physic of Data post-doc recurrence plots Renewable energy sources satellite social social bots socio-ecological systems socio-technical systems statistical physics Stochastic systems storage systems summer school time series analysis University of Padova workshop registration zimbabwe

Follow our research, events and job opportunities:

  • events (19)
  • jobs (11)
  • research (31)
  • Uncategorized (1)

Login

Register
Forgot your password?

Copyright© 2023 · Cookd Pro Theme by Shay Bocks