Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action Using Online Bots

TL;DR

Botivist is a platform that uses Twitter bots with varied strategies to engage volunteers in social activism, demonstrating high relevance in contributions and revealing insights into online civic engagement behaviors.

Contribution

This paper introduces Botivist, a novel platform employing Twitter bots with different strategies to effectively mobilize volunteers for social causes.

Findings

Over 80% of respondents contributed relevant proposals.

Different strategies affected the quantity and relevance of contributions.

Some offline-effective strategies hindered online participation.

Abstract

To help activists call new volunteers to action, we present Botivist: a platform that uses Twitter bots to find potential volunteers and request contributions. By leveraging different Twitter accounts, Botivist employs different strategies to encourage participation. We explore how people respond to bots calling them to action using a test case about corruption in Latin America. Our results show that the majority of volunteers (>80%) who responded to Botivist's calls to action contributed relevant proposals to address the assigned social problem. Different strategies produced differences in the quantity and relevance of contributions. Some strategies that work well offline and face-to-face appeared to hinder people's participation when used by an online bot. We analyze user behavior in response to being approached by bots with an activist purpose. We also provide strong evidence for the value of this type of civic media, and derive design implications.