Studying the Role of Social Bots During Cyber Flash Mobs

Abstract

A Cyber Flash Mob (CFM) is an event that is organized via social media, email, SMS, or other forms of digital communication technologies in which a group of people (who might have an agenda) get together online or offline to collectively conduct an act and then quickly disperse. In addition to the humans participating in these events, non-humans, i.e., artificial agents or social bots - which are computer software programmed to accomplish some tasks on your behalf such as tweeting, retweeting, and liking a tweet - also participate in a CFM. In this research, we study the shared orientations of the CFMs’ participants and try to understand the role of social bots in disseminating CFMs’ agendas by examining the communication network of these accounts, the toxicity of their posts, and the artifacts, e.g., the URLs they share. The goal is to understand how social bots help CFM organizers advertise, recruit, and share their products (e.g., videos, pictures) on various social media platforms.