Cyborgs for strategic communication on social media

Abstract

Social media platforms are a key ground of information consumption and dissemination. Key figures like politicians, celebrities, and activists have leveraged on its wide user base for strategic communication. Strategic communications, or StratCom, is the deliberate act of information creation and distribution. Its techniques are used by key figures for establishing brand and amplifying messages. Automated scripts are used on top of personal touches to effectively perform these tasks. The combination of automation and manual online posting creates a Cyborg social media profile, which is a hybrid between bot and human. In this study, we establish a quantitative definition for a Cyborg account, an account that is detected as bot in one time window, and identified as human in another. This definition makes use of frequent changes in bot classification labels and large differences in bot likelihood scores to identify Cyborgs. We perform a large-scale analysis across over 3.1 million users from Twitter collected from two key events, the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 US Elections. We extract Cyborgs from two datasets and employ tools from network science, natural language processing, and manual annotation to characterize Cyborg accounts. Our analyses identify Cyborg accounts are constructed for strategic communication uses, have a strong duality in their bot/human classification and are tactically positioned in the social media network, aiding these accounts to promote their desired content. Cyborgs are also discovered to have long online lives, indicating their ability to evade bot detectors, or the graciousness of platforms to allow their operations.