The role of bots in spreading conspiracies

Case study of discourse about earthquakes on Twitter

Bibliographic Data

ID22028387
AuthorsDmitry Erokhin (0000-0002-5191-0579, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, corresponding author), Nadejda Komendantova (0000-0003-2568-6179, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis)
Year2023
Volume92
Pages103740
Publication date2023-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2212-4209
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103740
OpenAlexW4381704688
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited21

In this paper, we identified seven most widely spread conspiracy discourses about earthquakes. These conspiracy discourses link earthquakes to military activities like secret nuclear bomb testing, God's Providence like the punishment of humans for their sins, space activities like aliens visiting our planet, the US secret weather control program HAARP, tests of the Large Hadron Collider, fracking projects, and freemasonic plots. Following the major earthquake in Indonesia at the end of November 2022, we extracted data from Twitter by keywords using the Hoaxy tool for tracking the spread of information on Twitter. Applying the Bot Sentinel tool, we also got data on the sentiment of the users. The divine and military discourses dominated the conspiracy discussion, followed by the discussions about extraction and HAARP. Though there were more human-like accounts than bot-like accounts, we found a positive correlation between the frequency of tweets on the conspiracy discourses and the bot scores of the accounts, which suggests that bot-like accounts were tweeting more than human-like accounts. It was also found that normal accounts tweeted more than toxic accounts, and there was a positive relationship between the bot score and the toxicity level of an account. It suggests that bot-like accounts were involved more in disruptive activities than human-like accounts

Computer security · Criminology · Media studies · Political science · Social media · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Public Relations and Crisis Communication · Social Psychology · Spam and Phishing Detection

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