Detecting political bots on Twitter during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election

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Volume Title

A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

Date

2020

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Language

en

Pages

10
2430-2439

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Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2020, Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Volume 2020-January

Abstract

In recent years, the impact of bots used for manipulating public opinion has become an increasingly prevalent topic in politics. Numerous sources have reported about the presence of political bots in social media sites such as Twitter. Compared to other countries, the influence of bots in Finnish politics has received little attention from media and researchers. This study aims to investigate the influence of bots on Finnish political Twitter, based on a dataset consisting of the accounts following major Finnish politicians before the Finnish parliamentary election of 2019. To identify the bots, we extend the existing models with the use of user-level metadata and state-of-art classification models. The results support our model as a suitable instrument for detecting Twitter bots. We found that, albeit there is a huge amount of bot accounts following major Finnish politicians, it is unlikely resulting from foreign entities' attempts to influence the Finnish parliamentary election.

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Publisher Copyright: © 2020 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

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Citation

Rossi, S, Rossi, M, Upreti, B R & Liu, Y 2020, Detecting political bots on Twitter during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election . in T X Bui (ed.), Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2020 . Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 2020-January, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 2430-2439, Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, United States, 07/01/2020 . < http://hdl.handle.net/10125/64040 >