Abstract
Social-bots-mediated information manipulation is influencing the public opinion environment, and their role and behavior patterns in news proliferation are worth exploring. Based on the analysis of bots' posting frequency, influence, and retweeting relationship, we take the diffusion of The New York Times' coverage of Xinjiang issue on the overseas social platform Twitter as an example and employ the two-step flow model. It is found that in the role of second-step diffusion, unlike posting news indiscriminately in first-step diffusion, social bots are more inclined to postcontroversial information in second-step diffusion; in terms of diffusion patterns, although social bots are more engaged in first-step diffusion than in second-step diffusion and can trigger human users to retweet, they are still inferior to humans in terms of influence.
Highlights
Social bots are playing an increasingly important role in global political communication, especially when the development of social media platforms and intelligent technologies provides a hotbed for political communication activities of social bots
It is worth noting that when social networks play a pivotal role in the flow of professional journalism, users become a key variable influencing whether news reaches a wider public; traditional news corporations shift their distribution from transparent editorial distribution to less transparent social distribution. is paper adopts a computational communication approach and focuses on e New York Times, the representative of American media, to investigate the information diffusion process on social media for its series of reports on Xinjiang issues
Focusing on Twitter, one of the most popular social platforms overseas, we examine how social bots bring news stories produced by professional media corporations such as e New York Times to social media and enable their further diffusion on social media
Summary
Social bots are playing an increasingly important role in global political communication, especially when the development of social media platforms and intelligent technologies provides a hotbed for political communication activities of social bots. It is worth noting that when social networks play a pivotal role in the flow of professional journalism, users become a key variable influencing whether news reaches a wider public; traditional news corporations shift their distribution from transparent editorial distribution to less transparent social distribution. We make use of the two-step flow of communication model to explore the role played by social bots in the diffusion of such reports and to assess the extent of their influence on human users. We explore the following questions: (1) to what extent do social bots participate in the information distribution of news in professional media; (2) what role do social bots play in the diffusion of such stories? We explore the following questions: (1) to what extent do social bots participate in the information distribution of news in professional media; (2) what role do social bots play in the diffusion of such stories? (3) can social bots become opinion leaders along the diffusion path of professional news stories?
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