作者
Fabio Del Vigna, Guido Caldarelli, Rocco De Nicola, Marinella Petrocchi, Fabio Saracco
发表日期
2019
简介
Social Media are nowadays the privileged channel for information spreading and news checking. Unexpectedly for most of the users, automated accounts, also known as social bots, contribute more and more to this process of news spreading. Beside the fruitful activities of benign bots, social platforms are unfortunately overwhelmed by malicious ones, which aim at perturbing the user base for altering the political, cultural, and economic perception of real-world facts. Using Twitter as a benchmark, we consider the traffic exchanged, over one month of observation, on a specific topic, namely the migration flux from Northern Africa to Italy. We measure the significant traffic of tweets only, by implementing an entropy-based null model that discounts the activity of users and the virality of tweets. Result show that social bots play a central role in the exchange of significant content. Indeed, not only the strongest hubs have a number of bots among their followers higher than expected, but furthermore a group of them, that can be assigned to the same political matrix, share a common set of bots as followers. The retwitting activity of such automated accounts amplifies the presence on the platform of the hubs’ messages.
学术搜索中的文章
F Del Vigna, G Caldarelli, R De Nicola, M Petrocchi… - 2019