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

Automatic Full Text Analysis in Public Social Media – Adoption of a Software Prototype to Investigate Political Communication

AbstractThe relevance of web 2.0 and social networks has increased rapidly in the last years. As people use different networks for different purposes, communication is a common goal. Activities in virtual social networks result in a massive amount of information. User-generated content is clustered respect to platform, way of communication as well as quality and richness of content. Often the subject of information exchange deals with personal issues concerning events and individuals. Until now this information is not considered by means of classic information retrieval. Identifying distinct subjects, gathering and analyzing information and putting them into relationship at once are open scientific challenges. This contribution describes an approach to partial aspects of this problem by providing a prototype for full text analysis in social networks. Furthermore, based on a test scenario of analyzing postings in the field of political communication, potentials and limitations of the prototype are discussed

The Impact of Social Media on Social Cohesion: A Double‐Edged Sword

Social media plays a major role in public communication in many countries. Therefore, it has a large impact on societies and their cohesion. This thematic issue explores the impact social media has on social cohesion on a local or national level. The nine articles in this issue focus on both the potential of social media usage to foster social cohesion and the possible drawbacks of social media which could negatively influence the development and maintenance of social cohesion. In the articles, social cohesion is examined from different perspectives with or without the background of crisis, and on various social media platforms. The picture that emerges is that of social media as, to borrow a phrase used in one of the articles, a double-edged sword

How Do Mobile Knowledge Workers Communicate?

In recent years, the relevance of mobile working has been steadily increasing. New mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) and their innovative functionalities (e.g. mobile applications) enable ubiquitous access to a large amount of data. As a result, the increasing diffusion of smartphones and mobile applications offers new potentials for enterprises. Current mobile devices and related mobile networks have reached a high level of maturity. Therefore, organizational aspects of mobile work become a focal point of interest for enterprises as well as for academics. This research focuses on the communication and information needs of knowledge workers while being “on the road”. In order to evaluate the communication behavior of mobile knowledge workers, the authors collected data of communication and information processes, which were initiated by IT-consultants. The results indicate that communication contexts play a major role for the selection of appropriate media channels

Analysis of Sentiments in Corporate Twitter Communication – A Case Study on an Issue of Toyota

Knowing about communication of specific issues in social media has become increasingly important for the reactive and proactive stakeholder-communication of enterprises. Tools have been designed to monitor social media sites and to aggregate data of discussions in social media. However, these tools do not consider the dynamics of discussions and are not able to reflect sentiments within these discussions. In our contribution, we address these aspects by analyzing a data set of around 730,000 Tweets published in a time frame of 19 weeks. Within this data set, we analyzed those Tweets dealing with the corporate crisis of Toyota in 2010. We classified sentiments by using a linguistic approach. In this context, we identified and investigated specific stages of communication (“quiet stages” and “peaks”). Additionally, our study concentrates on the sentiments found in Tweets of the ten most active participants of the discussion

IMPACT AND DIFFUSION OF SENTIMENT IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATION ON FACEBOOK

In recent years, political parties and politicians have begun to use public Facebook pages not only for the purpose of self-presentation but also to aim at entering into direct dialogues with citizens and enabling political discussions. Not only the owner of the page but also any people who are politically interested can create politically relevant postings on the Wall of the page. These Wall posts often exhibit sentiment associated with certain political topics, political parties or politicians. In this paper, we seek to examine whether sentiment occurring in Wall posts on public political Facebook pages has an effect on feedback in terms of the quantity of triggered comments. Based on a data set of 5,626 Wall posts from Facebook pages of German political parties and politicians, we find different significant relationships between the quantity of words indicating positive and negative emotions in a Wall post and the number of its corresponding comments. Furthermore, our results show that positive as well as negative emotions might diffuse in the subsequent comments

The Role of Sentiment in Information Propagation on Twitter – An Empirical Analysis of Affective Dimensions in Political Tweets

Twitter is, among other social-media platforms, a service, which is said to have an impact on the public discourse and communication in the society. With the unique feature of “retweeting,” Twitter is an ideal platform for users to spread information. Besides their content and intended use, Twitter messages (“tweets”) often convey pertinent information about their author’s sentiment. In this paper, we examine whether sentiment occurring in politically relevant tweets has an effect on their retweetability (i.e., how often these tweets will be retweeted). Based on a data set of approximately 65,000 tweets, we find a positive relationship between the quantity of words indicating affective dimensions including positive and negative emotions associated with certain political parties or politicians in tweets and their retweet rate. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results

Adoption and Use of Corporate Wikis in German Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

In recent years, corporate wikis have been increasingly adopted in enterprises. However, little research is devoted to theadoption and use of wikis in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are of high social and economic importance.The purpose of this paper is to examine the usage of enterprise wikis in SMEs and potential concerns that may hinder thediffusion of wikis in SMEs as well as other reasons for their reluctance to adopt wikis by conducting a survey of GermanSMEs. Findings indicate that a majority of SMEs do not intend to adopt wikis in their organization for various reasons.However, firms that have already introduced wikis seem to clearly benefit despite a number of concerns that might have anegative impact on the use and diffusion of wikis. Based on our results, we derive several implications for SMEs, inparticular with respect to how to overcome these obstacles to adoption and diffusion of wikis