Platformization of political communication introduced a number of changes to the domain of politics. As legacy media get incapsulated within online ecosystems, the boundaries between identities, norms, and roles get increasingly blurred. Platforms structure, standardize, and radically simplify our online interactions, making the public sphere vulnerable to a variety of automated and orchestrated interventions, which may produce surrogate versions of ‘the social’. In the past few years, major national elections around the world saw external actors seeking to influence the course of election campaigning online. One of the main tools for interference that researchers have pointed to is the use of automated and semi-automated accounts – i.e., bots.
Papers:
Boichak, O., Hemsley, J., Jackson, S., Tromble, R., Tanupabrungsun, S. (2021) Not the Bots You Are Looking For: Patterns and Effects of Orchestrated Interventions in the U.S. and German Elections. International Journal of Communication, 15(2021), 814-839. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/14866
Boichak, O., Jackson, S., Hemsley, J., & Tanupabrungsun, S. (2018). Automated Diffusion? Bots and Their Influence During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. In G. Chowdhury, J. McLeod, V. Gillet, & P. Willett (Eds.), Transforming Digital Worlds (pp. 17–26). Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_3
Jackson, S., Zhang, F., Boichak, O., Bryant, L., Li, Y., Hemsley, J., Stromer-Galley, J., Semaan, B., McCracken, N. (2017). Identifying Topics in Social Media Messages: A Lexicon-Based Approach. In 8th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Social Media for Good or Evil, #SMSociety 2017 (Vol. Part F129683). Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3097286.3097298
Zhang, F., Tanupabrungsun, S., Hemsley, J., Robinson, J.L., Semaan, B., Bryant, L., Stromer-Galley, J., Boichak, O., Hegde, Y. (2017). Strategic Temporality on Social Media During the General Election of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign. In 8th International Conference on Social Media and Society: Social Media for Good or Evil, #SMSociety 2017 (Vol. Part F129683). Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3097286.3097311
Presentations:
Not All Bots Are Created Equal: Exploring Automated Interventions in Online Political Discourse
(Talk – Social Media Lab, Ryerson University)
Bots Were not Created Equal: Automated Sociality and the Spread of Political Information in the 2016 U.S. Election
(Poster – First Symposium on Computational Social Sciences, The Alan Turing Institute)
Twitter Bots Across Elections (Poster, #SMSociety 2018)
Projects:
Digital Methods Summer School, University of Amsterdam
Amnesty Decoders: Urgent Actions Visualized
Summer School Series on Methods for Computational Social Science, University of Southern California