[Air-L] Twitter Chatbots

[Natalie Rock]

This one is out of my wheelhouse but maybe you know!I have a student who wants to investigate the impact Twitter chatbots have on framing political conversations, driving specific discussions, and determining voter intentions. His focus is the Brexit referendum. 

He wants to first classify tweets as coming from bots and then measure the impact of the tweets using three elements: strength of network connection: how important the influencing group of people or their status are to you; Immediacy of network connection: how close the group are to you (physical distance and time) at the time of the influence attempt; number: How many people are present in the environment.
 
I can foresee some challenges but like I say, this type of analysis is very much outside of my specialism. This is an ambitious student so before I recommend an alternative approach: Is there a strategy anyone can recommend that will allow him to correctly classify tweets as coming from bots? How can he measure strength and immediacy of network connection? Can anyone recommend any publications for him?

Thank y’all!

Natalie

Sent from my iPhone