Social media’s influence on politics and its persitence as an indicator and validator of public opinion has naturally given rise to concerns about the manipulation of our political landscape via inauthentic, automated accounts on social media. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the extent to which automated, or bot, accounts exist in relation to partisan user networks on a major social media platform—Twitter.
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Presentation (view the slides here) delivered at the New Agenda in Communication Series at the University of Texas on April 21, 2018.
Kearney, M. W. (in press). Automated accounts in partisan user networks on Twitter. In S. Jarvis (Ed.) New agendas in communication: Conservatively speaking: How right-wing media and messaging (re)made American politics. New York: Routledge.