TY - JOUR
T1 - Spotting Political Social Bots in Twitter
T2 - A Use Case of the 2019 Spanish General Election
AU - Pastor-Galindo, Javier
AU - Zago, Mattia
AU - Nespoli, Pantaleone
AU - Bernal, Sergio Lopez
AU - Celdran, Alberto Huertas
AU - Perez, Manuel Gil
AU - Ruiperez-Valiente, Jose A.
AU - Perez, Gregorio Martinez
AU - Marmol, Felix Gomez
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received April 6, 2020; revised July 27, 2020 and October 1, 2020; accepted October 12, 2020. Date of publication October 16, 2020; date of current version December 9, 2020. This study was partially funded by a grant from the Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute (INCIBE) with code INCIBEI-2015-27353, by the Spanish Government grants FPU18/00304, FJCI-2017-34926 and RYC-2015-18210, co-funded by the European Social Fund, by a predoctoral grant from the University of Murcia, by the Irish Research Council, under the government of Ireland post-doc fellowship (grant code GOIPD/2018/466), by the University of Zürich UZH, and by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement No. 830927, namely the H2020 Concordia Project. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was N. Zincir-Heywood. (Corresponding author: Javier Pastor-Galindo.) Javier Pastor-Galindo, Mattia Zago, Pantaleone Nespoli, Sergio López Bernal, Manuel Gil Pérez, José A. Ruipérez-Valiente, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, and Félix Gómez Mármol are with the Department of Information and Communications Engineering, University of Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain (e-mail: javierpg@um.es; mattia.zago@um.es; panta-leone.nespoli@um.es; slopez@um.es; mgilperez@um.es; jruiperez@um.es; gregorio@um.es; felixgm@um.es).
Funding Information:
This study was partially funded by a grant from the Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute (INCIBE) with code INCIBEI-2015-27353, by the Spanish Government grants FPU18/00304, FJCI-2017-34926 and RYC-2015-18210, co-funded by the European Social Fund, by a predoctoral grant from the University of Murcia, by the Irish Research Council, under the government of Ireland post-doc fellowship (grant code GOIPD/2018/466), by the University of Z?rich UZH, and by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement No. 830927, namely the H2020 Concordia Project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2004-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political elections and manipulate constituents. In this article at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots on Twitter in the context of the November 2019 Spanish general election. Throughout our study, we classified involved users as social bots or humans, and examined their interactions from a quantitative (i.e., amount of traffic generated and existing relations) and qualitative (i.e., user's political affinity and sentiment towards the most important parties) perspectives. Results demonstrated that a non-negligible amount of those bots actively participated in the election, supporting each of the five principal political parties.
AB - While social media has been proved as an exceptionally useful tool to interact with other people and massively and quickly spread helpful information, its great potential has been ill-intentionally leveraged as well to distort political elections and manipulate constituents. In this article at hand, we analyzed the presence and behavior of social bots on Twitter in the context of the November 2019 Spanish general election. Throughout our study, we classified involved users as social bots or humans, and examined their interactions from a quantitative (i.e., amount of traffic generated and existing relations) and qualitative (i.e., user's political affinity and sentiment towards the most important parties) perspectives. Results demonstrated that a non-negligible amount of those bots actively participated in the election, supporting each of the five principal political parties.
KW - Data mining and (big) data analysis
KW - election manipulation
KW - fake news
KW - information technology services
KW - information visualization
KW - machine learning
KW - political social bots
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85097758109&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TNSM.2020.3031573
DO - 10.1109/TNSM.2020.3031573
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85097758109
VL - 17
SP - 2156
EP - 2170
JO - IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
JF - IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
SN - 1932-4537
IS - 4
M1 - 9226407
ER -