‘The Tireless Selling-Machine’ – Commercial Deployment of Social Bots during Black Friday Season on Twitter

Abstract

In recent years, mainstream E-commerce platforms have changed the way consumer goods are merchandized online. While such platforms increasingly discover social elements to drive sales, social media start implementing E-commerce features themselves. This emerging intersection also provides space for bot activity in a Social Commerce (SC) context, which is sparsely understood. In this short paper, we investigate the deployment of social bots during a large-scale commercial event. To this end, we applied bot detection techniques to the Twitter communication during the 2018 Black Friday season. Using three distinct metrics, we identified 42 bot-like accounts. A manual classification of 11,889 tweets found those bots to be primarily deployed in pre- transactional phases of SC to promote third party products and to initiate external transactions. Our results further suggest adapting detection metrics to event- specific user behavior. Further research aims at the dynamics, impact, and network positions of SC bots. Keywords: