# Bot Electioneering Volume: Visualizing Social Bot Activity During Elections

## TL;DR

This paper introduces Bot Electioneering Volume (BEV), a web tool that visualizes likely social bot activities on Twitter during elections to raise awareness and aid in combating malicious bot influence.

## Contribution

The paper presents the BEV framework and codebase for visualizing and analyzing social bot activity during elections, supporting public awareness and future research.

## Key findings

- BEV visualizes daily bot activity levels during elections.
- The framework highlights topics targeted by social bots.
- Open-source code facilitates further research and mitigation efforts.

## Abstract

It has been widely recognized that automated bots may have a significant impact on the outcomes of national events. It is important to raise public awareness about the threat of bots on social media during these important events, such as the 2018 US midterm election. To this end, we deployed a web application to help the public explore the activities of likely bots on Twitter on a daily basis. The application, called Bot Electioneering Volume (BEV), reports on the level of likely bot activities and visualizes the topics targeted by them. With this paper we release our code base for the BEV framework, with the goal of facilitating future efforts to combat malicious bots on social media.