Political Bots

Work on “political bots” (automated social media accounts which mimic human actors) has often focused on computational propaganda and the potential negative impacts of automation in politics. This project examines the types of political bots that exist and their complex relationships with other political actors. A series of papers highlights that political bots are neither necessarily good nor bad. This work contributes to important policy conversations. For example, the use of bots in Canada’s political landscape gives rise to concerns about political advertising and voter suppression and this work has been used to help develop policy responses.

​

Methods:

• Case studies of the 2015 federal election in Canada and of the WikiEdits bot @gccaedits

• Manual content analysis of tweets and newspaper articles

• Review of government documents collected via ATIP requests

• In-depth interviews with policy makers, bot creators, journalisms and other political actors

​

Outputs:​

• Dubois, E. & McKelvey, F. (2018). Building bot typologies. In Woolley, S. and Howard, P. Computational Propaganda. (pp. 64-85). Oxford University Press.

• Dubois, E. & McKelvey, F. (2019). Political Bots: Disrupting Canada’s Democracy. Canadian Journal of Communication, 44(2), 27-33. 

• Dubois, E. & McKelvey, F. (2017). The Risks and Rewards of Political Bots for Canadian Democracy. The Toronto Star.

• Dubois, E. & Reepschlager, A. (2019). Elections Advertising in a Changing Media Ecosystem. Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law, 13, 183-191.

• Ford, H., Dubois, E. & Puschmann, C. (2016). Keeping Ottawa honest one tweet at a time: Politicians,journalists, Wikipedians and their bots. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4891-4914. 

• McKelvey, F. & Dubois, E. (2017). Computational Propaganda in Canada: The Use of Political Bots (PDF) as part of Computational Propaganda Worldwide working papers, The Computational Propaganda Project.

• McKelvey, F. & Dubois, E. (2017). Toward the responsible use of bots in politics. Policy Options.

• Reepschlager, A. & Dubois, E. (2019). New election laws are no match for the Internet. Policy Options.

​

Project leads and collaborators:

Dr. Elizabeth Dubois, Dr. Fenwick McKelvey, Dr. Heather Ford, Dr. Cornelius Puschmann, Dr. Amanda Clarke