Twitter bots can promote good behaviour: study

Twitter bots earned a bad reputation for their alleged role in the 2016 US presidential election but a study has found that automated tweets can help promote good behaviour and not just fake news.

Researchers at University of South Carolina (USC) in the US designed a large-scale experiment to analyse the spread of information on social networks.

In a study published in the journal PLoS ONE, they deployed a network of algorithm-driven Twitter accounts, or social bots, programmed to spread positive messages on Twitter.

"We found that bots can be used to run interventions on social media that trigger or foster good behaviours," said Emilio Ferrara, Research Assistant Professor at University of Southern California.
 

However, researchers also found that information is much more likely to become viral when people are exposed to the same piece of information multiple times through multiple sources.

They first developed a dozen positive hashtags, ranging from health tips to fun activities, such as encouraging users to get the flu shot, high-five a stranger and even photoshop a celebrity's face onto a turkey at Thanksgiving.

They, then designed a network of 39 bots to deploy these hashtags in a synchronised manner to 25,000 real followers during a four-month period from October to December 2016.

Each bot automatically recorded when a target user retweeted intervention-related content and also each exposure that had taken place prior to retweeting.

"We also saw that every exposure increased the probability of adoption - there is a cumulative reinforcement effect," said Ferrara.

"It seems there are some cognitive mechanisms that reinforce your likelihood to believe in or adopt a piece of information when it is validated by multiple sources in your social network," Ferrara said.

Aside from revealing the hidden dynamics that drive human behaviour online, this discovery could also improve how positive intervention strategies are deployed on social networks in many scenarios, including public health announcements for disease control or emergency management in the wake of a crisis, researchers said.