Do Social Bots Dream of Electric Sheep? A Categorisation of Social Media Bot Accounts

So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however, somewhat unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the results of this literature review, we propose a scheme for categorising bot accounts on social media sites. Our scheme groups bot accounts by two dimensions - Imitation of human behaviour and Intent.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Information Systems, 201

Strategies and Influence of Social Bots in a 2017 German state election

This study aims to examine the influence of environmental and personal factors on knowledge-sharing behaviour (KSB) and whether more leads to superior innovative work behaviour (IWB) at tertiary level in Vietnam. Our case is Hanoi University (HANU), one of the Leading Public Universities in Vietnam. This study applies the structural equation modelling (SEM) to investigate the research model based on social cognitive theory. Based on a survey of 320 academic staff at HANU, the results show that two environmental factors (subjective norm, trust) and three personal factors (knowledge self-efficacy, enjoyment in helping others, and reciprocity) significantly influence KSB. The results also indicate that employee willingness to share knowledge enable the organisation to promote IWB. It is hoped that academic staff and university leaders from other countries may find the case study useful for deeper understanding of the effects of social influences, personal perceptions and KSB on IBW in the future

Threat or Opportunity? - Examining Social Bots in Social Media Crisis Communication

Crisis situations are characterised by their sudden occurrence and an unclear information situation. In that context, social media platforms have become a highly utilised resource for collective information gathering to fill these gaps. However, there are indications that not only humans, but also social bots are active on these platforms during crisis situations. Although identifying the impact of social bots during extreme events seems to be a highly relevant topic, research remains sparse. To fill this research gap, we started a bigger project in analysing the influence of social bots during crisis situations. As a part of this project, we initially conducted a case study on the Manchester Bombing 2017 and analysed the social bot activity. Our results indicate that mainly benign bots are active during crisis situations. While the quantity of the bot accounts is rather low, their tweet activity indicates a high influence

Defining Bots in an Enterprise Context

Bots, Virtual Assistants and Virtual Agents are well known in a personal environment. Technologies like Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa serve as digital assistants to enhance both accessibility and productivity. Yet, these technologies have to play with dif

MEANINGFUL USE OF SOCIAL BOTS? POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS IN CRISIS COMMUNICATION DURING DISASTERS

Social bots are gaining in popularity and complexity. These technologies could provide assistance and new approaches to handle the numerous tasks on social media that occur in crisis communication. Social bots are applications that automatically produce content and interact with humans on social media, trying to emulate and possibly influence human behaviour. They often have a negative association, but there are many bots which perform benign tasks. Currently, there is no overview of tasks that social bots could support in emergency management. This project is intended to contribute to close this gap by examining possible applications of such bots in crisis communication during natural disasters. The research problem is investigated from two perspectives. First, we explore whether there is already existing bot activities in crisis communication through analysing the Twitter communication of the Eastern Australian bushfires in March 2018. Second, to identify possible bot application in the context of crisis and emergency management experts were interviewed. The results indicate current crisis communication bot activities are mostly limited to automated alerts by emergency management organisations. The expert interviews illustrate high potential and demand for social bots in relevant emergency management organisations. The study shows application fields for social bots in all phases of the emergency management cycle and beyond

Social bots in a commercial context – A case study on SoundCloud

Recently, automated communication on social media has seen increased attention. Social bots, social media accounts controlled by algorithms that mimic human behaviour, have been found to attempt to influence users in several political contexts. However, their use in a commercial context, e.g. to boost sales of a product by aggressively promoting it with thousands of messages, has so far been neglected. To address this shortcoming, this paper examines the case of the social media music platform SoundCloud. We gathered a dataset of six months of activity, comprising 15,850,069 tracks and 12,125,095 comments. We then calculated a comment uniqueness score for highly active accounts to assess the variability of their comments. First analyses show that some accounts post suspiciously repetitive comments. These accounts also frequently repost existing content, but contribute little original content. An analysis of the commenting network further underlines that these accounts differ clearly from regular users. We conclude that the comment uniqueness metric can be used as an indicator to distinguish bots from humans, and that a considerable proportion of SoundCloud comments are likely to emanate from bots or semi-automated accounts. The implications of these findings and future plans are discussed

Virtual Moderation Assistance: Creating Design Guidelines for Virtual Assistants Supporting Creative Workshops

To remain competitive, businesses need to develop innovative and profitable products, processes and services. The development of innovation relies on novel ideas, which can be generated during creative workshops. In this context the Design Thinking approach, a problem-solving methodology based on collaboration, user-centricity and creativity, may be used. However, guidance and moderation of this process require a vast amount of skills and knowledge. As technologies like artificial intelligence have the potential of making machines our collaboration partner in the future, creating virtual assistants adapting human behaviors is promising. To reduce cognitive dissonance and stress on both the moderators and participants, we investigate the potential of a virtual assistant to support moderation in a Design Thinking process to improve innovative output as well as perceived satisfaction. We therefore developed design guidelines for virtual assistants supporting creative workshops based on qualitative expert interviews and related literature following the Design Science Research Methodology