{"id":960,"date":"2019-03-04T15:20:11","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T19:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/?p=960"},"modified":"2022-01-19T08:28:44","modified_gmt":"2022-01-19T12:28:44","slug":"beware-of-the-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/2019\/03\/04\/beware-of-the-bots\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware of the Bots"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Emily Tatum<\/p>\n

The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies continued its Colloquium lecture series on \u201cRussian Media Strategies at Home and Abroad\u201d this past Monday, February 25, with guest lecturer Joshua Tucker, Professor of Politics and co-founder and co-Director of the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory at New York University (NYU). Tucker discussed the SMaPP lab\u2019s efforts to detect Russian bots and how bots work in the current Russian media system.<\/p>\n

Tucker began by posing the question, \u201cHow do authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition?\u201d Tucker explained that authoritarian regimes now respond by engaging on the internet in addition to traditional censoring or direct repression. Tucker claimed that through engagement, authoritarian regimes are \u201ctaking an old technique, censorship, and importing it into a new context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past 20 years in Russia, Vladimir Putin has responded to online opposition by altering the Russian media system. In his first term as President (2000-2008), Putin quickly brought the private television industry under state control. However, he largely left the internet and social media unregulated. Tucker claimed that after a quick respite under Dmitry Medvedev (2008-2012), Putin\u2019s reentry in his second term marked \u201cthe beginning of a different story.\u201d Putin began systematically filtering media content with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, using media as a weapon of foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Tucker claimed that authoritarian regime internet engagement can involve the use of bots, which Tucker defines as \u201caccounts operated by automated computer algorithms.\u201d The SMaPP lab focuses its research on Russian Twitter accounts from early 2014 to late 2017. The lab compiled 25 million tweets from 1.5 million Russian Twitter users drawn from the Twitter Search API. Tucker\u2019s team ultimately created a comprehensive coding system where every Twitter account was categorized between: official account, bot, human being, cyborg, or spam.<\/p>\n

The data collected allowed Tucker to evaluate larger trends of bot usage in Russia. Tucker explained, \u201cYou would think the real value of this data is the text, whereas it\u2019s really the 50 pieces of metadata attached.\u201d For example, Tucker presented a case where a group of bots would only tweet news headlines without links to articles. Tucker\u2019s team concluded that these bots were created to affect trending topics and to optimize Google searches.<\/p>\n

Tucker concluded by stating that during this window from 2014-2017, one half of Russian political Twitter accounts were bots, which contained comparable numbers of pro-Kremlin and pro-opposition bots. This conclusion counters the previously held public perception that Russian bots are primarily pro-Kremlin. The conclusion represents the growing domination and diversity of bots in the Russian domestic media landscape.<\/p>\n

Tucker repeatedly stated throughout the lecture, \u201cWe don\u2019t have ground truth.\u201d He wanted to make the distinction that the SMaPP lab\u2019s findings are still built around human classification. However, Tucker argues that the system that they have built is the best current system, devoid of leaked data and outside influence. He designed the test to be \u201cscalable, transparent, replicable, and retrospective.\u201d Tucker will continue to expand the lab\u2019s bot testing to other pressing opposition movements and elections across the world.<\/p>\n

Emily Tatum is a senior majoring in International Studies with a Latin American focus and in Political Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Emily Tatum The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies continued its Colloquium lecture series on \u201cRussian Media Strategies at Home and Abroad\u201d this past Monday, February 25, with guest lecturer Joshua Tucker, Professor of Politics and co-founder and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":961,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colloquium-talks","category-lecture_reviews","category-russia-in-the-news","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}