@article{2018:muhle:socialbots,
title = {Socialbots in politischen Online-Konversationen. Eine (überschätzte) Gefahr für demokratische Willensbildung im Internet?},
year = {2018},
note = {The manipulative use of so-called social bots on the Internet is
increasingly regarded as a problem and danger to the public and to
democracy . At the same time, however, research regarding the
political use of social bots is nascent . Up to now, only few
empirical studies on the topic exist, which primarily make use of
automated big data analyses to identify social bots and their
political agenda . In this article we argue that existing research on
the role of social bots in the 2016 US presidential election campaign
has significant shortcomings, which may limit the validity of results
on the influence of social bots in political conversations on Twitter
. While existing research suggests that social bots (identified using
automated methods) were able to influence online conversations on
Twitter and demonstrated bias towards the Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump, we contend that these findings were in large
part the result of methodological choices that are inherent to
conducting empirical research at scale using big data . In this paper,
using Twitter data collected during the 2016 first US presidential
debate, we combine network analysis methods with qualitative
sociological approaches and find in fact that social bots tweeted
rather negatively about Trump and did not exert significant influence
on online conversations .},
journal = {ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen},
pages = {618--638},
author = {Muhle, Florian and Ackland, Robert and Timothy and Graham},
volume = {49},
number = {3}
}