Skip down to main content

How Bots Win Friends and Influence People

Published on
12 Jul 2017
Written by
Philip Howard and Robert Gorwa

Project PI Phil Howard was interviewed for a short article in IEEE Spectrum.

Every now and then sociologist Phil Howard writes messages to social media accounts accusing them of being bots. It’s like a Turing test of the state of online political propaganda. “Once in a while a human will come out and say, ‘I’m not a bot,’ and then we have a conversation,” he said at the European Conference for Science Journalists in Copenhagen on June 29.

In his academic writing, Howard calls bots “highly automated accounts.” By default, the accounts publish messages on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites at rates even a teenager couldn’t match. Human puppet-masters manage them, just like the Wizard of Oz, but with a wide variety of commercial aims and political repercussions. Howard and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute in England published a working paper [PDF] last month examining the influence of these social media bots on politics in nine countries.

“Our goal is to produce large amounts of evidence, gathered systematically, so that we can make some safe, if not conservative, generalizations about where public life is going,” Howard says. The working paper, available ahead of peer-review in draft form, reports on countries with a mixture of different types of governments: Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Poland, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States.

Read the full article here.

 

Related Topics:

Privacy Overview
Oxford Internet Institute

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies
  • moove_gdrp_popup -  a cookie that saves your preferences for cookie settings. Without this cookie, the screen offering you cookie options will appear on every page you visit.

This cookie remains on your computer for 365 days, but you can adjust your preferences at any time by clicking on the "Cookie settings" link in the website footer.

Please note that if you visit the Oxford University website, any cookies you accept there will appear on our site here too, this being a subdomain. To control them, you must change your cookie preferences on the main University website.

Google Analytics

This website uses Google Tags and Google Analytics to collect anonymised information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Keeping these cookies enabled helps the OII improve our website.

Enabling this option will allow cookies from:

  • Google Analytics - tracking visits to the ox.ac.uk and oii.ox.ac.uk domains

These cookies will remain on your website for 365 days, but you can edit your cookie preferences at any time via the "Cookie Settings" button in the website footer.