https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00330-0
Regular Article
Brexit and bots: characterizing the behaviour of automated accounts on Twitter during the UK election
1
IMT School for Advanced Studies, P.zza S. Francesco 19, 55100, Lucca, Italy
2
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG, Oxford, UK
3
Institute for Applied Mathematics, National Research Council, Via dei Taurini 19, 00185, Rome, Italy
Received:
30
July
2021
Accepted:
9
March
2022
Published online:
22
March
2022
Online Social Networks (OSNs) offer new means for political communications that have quickly begun to play crucial roles in political campaigns, due to their pervasiveness and communication speed. However, the OSN environment is quite slippery and hides potential risks: many studies presented evidence about the presence of d/misinformation campaigns and malicious activities by genuine or automated users, putting at severe risk the efficiency of online and offline political campaigns. This phenomenon is particularly evident during crucial political events, as political elections. In the present paper, we provide a comprehensive description of the networks of interactions among users and bots during the UK elections of 2019. In particular, we focus on the polarised discussion about Brexit on Twitter, analysing a data set made of more than 10 millions tweets posted for over a month. We found that the presence of automated accounts infected the debate particularly in the days before the UK national elections, in which we find a steep increase of bots in the discussion; in the days after the election day, their incidence returned to values similar to the ones observed few weeks before the elections. On the other hand, we found that the number of suspended users (i.e. accounts that were removed by the platform for some violation of the Twitter policy) remained constant until the election day, after which it reached significantly higher values. Remarkably, after the TV debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, we observed the injection of a large number of novel bots whose behaviour is markedly different from that of pre-existing ones. Finally, we explored the bots’ political orientation, finding that their activity is spread across the whole political spectrum, although in different proportions, and we studied the different usage of hashtags and URLs by automated accounts and suspended users, targeting the formation of common narratives in different sides of the debate.
Key words: Social networks / Bots / Misinformation
The original online version of this article was revised: in the Funding section the phrase “FS acknowledges support from the IMT School for Advanced Studies PAI project Toffee and EU project SoBigData-PlusPlus, nr. 871042.” should have been “FS acknowledges support from the IMT School for Advanced Studies PAI project Toffee. This work is supported by the European Union – Horizon 2020 Program under the scheme “INFRAIA-01-2018-2019 – Integrating Activities for Advanced Communities”, Grant Agreement n.871042, “SoBigData++: European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics” (www.sobigdata.eu).”
A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00337-7.
Copyright comment corrected publication 2022
© The Author(s) 2022. corrected publication 2022
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