Twitter bots for good: Study reveals how information spreads on social media
Sep 2017, phys.org
Players:
Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute computer scientist and research assistant professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Computer Science, and a team from the Technical University of Denmark.
Experiment:
39 bots deploy "positive-themed" hashtags to 25,000 Twitter users for four-months.
Conclusion:
Information is much more likely to become viral when people are exposed to the same piece of information multiple times through multiple sources. "This milestone shatters a long-held belief that ideas spread like an infectious disease, or contagion, with each exposure resulting in the same probability of infection," says Ferrara. -phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-twitter-bots-good-reveals-social.html
Source:
Bjarke Mønsted et al. Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots, PLOS ONE (2017). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184148
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Post Script:
Post from 5 years ago about this topic, check out Tim Hwang at the HOPE#9 conference talking about his ethically and legally dubious twitter-bot experiments on an unsuspecting cluster of 500 users:
Social Bots, Network Address, 2012
In case you were wondering the difference between robo- and -bot
Robo vs Bot, Network Address, 2013
Aaaaaand, why are we still not using the word "semibots?"
The Semibots Are Coming, Network Address, 2015
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