This study aims to explore social bots' role in online climate change discussions. By analyzing 491,279 climate-change-related tweets, we found that social bots were actively engaged in climate change discussions ...This study aims to explore social bots' role in online climate change discussions. By analyzing 491,279 climate-change-related tweets, we found that social bots were actively engaged in climate change discussions on Twitter and contributed up to 1.5.4% of related contents. Bots promote the saliency of energy, climate actions and climate strikes on public agenda. 83.1% of tweets posted by social bots support climate change activism, and 16.9% support climate change skepticism. However, social bot skeptics are more strategical than social bot activists in terms of launching conversations with opposing-minded humans, and avoiding amplification of opposing voices. They are also more successful in inciting opposing-minded humans' initiative conversation and like-minded humans' amplification. Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.展开更多
基金This work was supported in part by the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation of China(18ZDA307)National Key Research and Development Program of China(2017YFA0604500)+2 种基金China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(2020M672754)Center for High Performance Computing and System Simulation,Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology(Qingdao)AI-Info Communication Study(AIS)Scheme 2021/22 is supported by AI and Media Research Lab,Hong Kong Baptist University,China.
文摘This study aims to explore social bots' role in online climate change discussions. By analyzing 491,279 climate-change-related tweets, we found that social bots were actively engaged in climate change discussions on Twitter and contributed up to 1.5.4% of related contents. Bots promote the saliency of energy, climate actions and climate strikes on public agenda. 83.1% of tweets posted by social bots support climate change activism, and 16.9% support climate change skepticism. However, social bot skeptics are more strategical than social bot activists in terms of launching conversations with opposing-minded humans, and avoiding amplification of opposing voices. They are also more successful in inciting opposing-minded humans' initiative conversation and like-minded humans' amplification. Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.
