Measuring the Interference Effect of Bots in Disseminating Opposing Viewpoints Related to COVID-19 on Twitter Using Epidemiological Modeling

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Date
2023-01-03
Authors
Maleki, Maryam
Mead, Esther
Arani, Mohammad
Agarwal, Nitin
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2296
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The activity of bots can influence the opinions and behavior of people, especially within the political landscape where hot-button issues are debated. To evaluate the bot presence among the propagation trends of opposing politically-charged viewpoints on Twitter, we collected a comprehensive set of hashtags related to COVID-19. We then applied both the SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered) and the SEIZ (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Skeptics) epidemiological models to three different dataset states including, total tweets in a dataset, tweets by bots, and tweets by humans. Our results show the ability of both models to model the diffusion of opposing viewpoints on Twitter, with the SEIZ model outperforming the SIR. Additionally, although our results show that both models can model the diffusion of information spread by bots with some difficulty, the SEIZ model outperforms. Our analysis also reveals that the magnitude of the bot-induced diffusion of this type of information varies by subject.
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Digital Methods, botometer, covid-19, epidemiological modeling, misinformation, social network analysis
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https://hdl.handle.net/10125/102915
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10
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Proceedings of the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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Digital Methods
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