Oxford Internet Institute

6 June 2017

Authors: Philip Howard

Platforms like Twitter and sources like Wikipedia are important parts of the information diet for many citizens. In this data memo, we analyse Twitter data on bot activity and ... Read More Social Media and News Sources during the 2017 UK General Election

2 June 2017

Authors: Robert Gorwa

Project members Tim Hwang and Sam Woolley have a new article in Slate discussing bots that follow political candidates. Let’s be clear: Coordinated campaigns of misinformation and manipulation on ... Read More The Most Important Lesson From the Dust-Up Over Trump’s Fake Twitter Followers

31 May 2017

Authors: Robert Gorwa

Computational propaganda distributes large amounts of misinformation about politics and public policy over social media platforms. The combination of automation and propaganda can significantly impact public opinion during important ... Read More Junk News and Bots during the 2017 UK General Election

17 January 2017

Authors: Gillian Bolsover

We are pleased to announce a special issue of the journal Big Data dedicated to computational propaganda. This special issue is guest edited by project members Professor Phil Howard ... Read More Call for Papers: Special Issue on Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data

14 January 2017

Authors: Philip Howard

Does social media use have a positive or negative impact on civic engagement? The cynical “slacktivism hypothesis” holds that if citizens use social media for political conversation, those conversations ... Read More Social Media, Civic Engagement, and the Slactivism Hypothesis: Lessons from Mexico’s “El Bronco

10 January 2017

Authors: Gillian Bolsover

Automated social media accounts known as ‘bots’ may be used to distort political perception online. We speak with research director Samuel Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda ... Read More Fake News Bots

25 October 2016

Authors: Philip Howard

The Internet certainly disrupted our understanding of what communication can be, who does it, how, and to what effect. What constitutes the Internet has always been an evolving suite ... Read More IJOC: Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents — Introduction

15 October 2016

Authors: Philip Howard

We review the great variety of critical scholarship on algorithms, automation, and big data in areas of contemporary life both to document where there has been robust scholarship and ... Read More IJOC: Automation, Big Data and Politics: A Research Review

15 October 2016

Authors: Philip Howard

Do we have a right to transparency when we use content personalization systems? Building on prior work in discrimination detection in data mining, I propose algorithm auditing as a ... Read More Auditing for Transparency in Content Personalization Systems

15 October 2016

Authors: Philip Howard

An increasing amount of open source code is available on the Internet for quickly setting up and deploying bots on Twitter. This development of open-source Twitter bots signals the ... Read More Where Do Bots Come From? An Analysis of Bot Codes Shared on GitHub

14 October 2016

Authors: Philip Howard

The Internet certainly disrupted our understanding of what communication can be, who does it, how, and to what effect. What constitutes the Internet has always been an evolving suite ... Read More IJOC: Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents — Introduction

1 April 2016

Authors: Philip Howard

Over the last several years political actors worldwide have begun harnessing the digital power of social bots — software programs designed to mimic human social media users on platforms ... Read More Automating Power: Social Bot Interference in Global Politics