The role of automated agents in collective actions on social media: individuals, interactions and networks

Thesis

Social media profoundly influences personal lives and civil discourse, and social bots have emerged as significant actors in promoting and disrupting civic discussions and activism on it. This dissertation addresses the gap in the lack of empirical studies examining bots’ impact on political communication and online activism.

Focusing on two social movements cases, Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Black Lives Matter (BLM), the research investigates how automated accounts influence political discourse and collective actions. It explores three dimensions of bot impact: individual behaviour, social network, and the discourse shaped by both bots and humans during protests.

The study begins by developing a robust method for identifying social bots in social media platforms. Using XR as a case study, this study then finds that social bots and human users create information cascades around climate protests, significantly altering human sentiment and posting behaviour.

At the meso level, the research analyses how bots affect human-to-human connections within online networks during BLM protests. It identifies communities or 'botnets' of social bots that cluster based on differing motivations, which contribute to a decline in human cohesiveness within social networks. Users with different attitudes towards BLM are affected differently by these bots.

Building on these findings, the dissertation investigates the mechanisms behind social bots’ effects on human discourse, which is a key component of online activism. It refines existing theoretical frameworks to account for the hybrid nature of online activism involving both human and automated agents and reveals how social bot strategies can create, constrain, or reshape the discursive opportunities for activists.

Overall, this research enhances our understanding of social bots in online activism, offering significant theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions. It has important implications for activists and policymakers and suggests various future directions in the study of social bots and online activism.

Authors: Li, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aqbv7j58n
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: online activism; Extinction Rebellion (XR); political communication; Black Lives Matter (BLM); social bots; online social network
• Subjects: Communication; Sociology of internet; Computational social sciences; Political sociology