Social Cyber Geographical Worldwide Inventory of Bots
Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley

TL;DR
This study develops a multilingual, geospatial analysis of social media bots worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing their distribution, language use, and country-specific narratives, highlighting global bot prevalence and behavior.
Contribution
Introduces Multilingual BotBuster and a Geographical Location Identifier to analyze social media bots across multiple languages and countries during a global event.
Findings
Bots are present in about 20% of social media accounts per country.
Bots tend to maintain consistent language use regardless of location.
Bots distribute narratives aligned with their declared country of affiliation.
Abstract
Social Cyber Geography is the space in the digital cyber realm that is produced through social relations. Communication in the social media ecosystem happens not only because of human interactions, but is also fueled by algorithmically controlled bot agents. Most studies have not looked at the social cyber geography of bots because they focus on bot activity within a single country. Since creating a bot uses universal programming technology, bots, how prevalent are these bots throughout the world? To quantify bot activity worldwide, we perform a multilingual and geospatial analysis on a large dataset of social data collected from X during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2021. This pandemic affected most of the world, and thus is a common topic of discussion. Our dataset consists of ~100 mil posts generated by ~31mil users. Most bot studies focus only on English-speaking countries, because…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpam and Phishing Detection
