Impact of Bot Involvement in an Incentivized Blockchain-Based Online Social Media Platform

ABSTRACT

Incentivized blockchain-based online social media (BOSM), where creators and curators of popular content are paid in cryptocurrency, have recently emerged. Traditional social media ecosystems have experienced significant bot involvement in their platforms, which has often had a negative impact on both users and platforms. BOSM can provide additional direct financial incentives as motivation for both bots’ and human users’ engagement. Using the panel vector autoregression and regression discontinuity in time framework, we analyze two distinct data sets from Steemit, the largest and most popular BOSM, to study the impact of bot engagement on human users and the impact of changes in financial reward on user engagement. Interestingly, our findings demonstrate that while increased engagement by bots is positively associated with engagement by human users, the association between bot engagement and human user engagement decreases as the number of votes for a post increases. We also find that shifts in economic incentives significantly influence the behavior of both human users and bots. This research provides significant insights on how social media platforms can leverage economic incentives to influence user behavior and, more importantly, leverage bots’ activity to increase the engagement of their human users.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• social media networks
• bots
• user engagement
• online social media
• online incentives
• Steemit
• PVAR model
• RDiT model

Supplementary Information

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2229124

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Ram D. Gopal acknowledges funding support from the Gillmore Centre for Financial Technology at the Warwick Business School. Raymond A. Patterson acknowledges funding support from the Haskayne School of Business.

Notes on contributors

Fatemeh Delkhosh

Fatemeh Delkhosh ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. student in Business Technology Management at Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada. She holds an M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology. Her research interest is in the economics of blockchain, with a particular interest in how to manage and design blockchain-based platforms. Her research generally focuses on the economics of information systems using analytical modeling and econometric methods.

Ram D. Gopal

Ram D. Gopal ([email protected]) is the Information Systems Society’s Distinguished Fellow and a Professor of Information Systems and Management at the Warwick Business School, United Kingdom. His research portfolio spans big data analytics, health informatics, financial technologies, information security, privacy and valuation, intellectual property rights, online market design, and business impacts of technology. His research work has appeared in Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and many other journals and conference proceedings.

Raymond A. Patterson

Raymond A. Patterson ([email protected]; corresponding author) holds the Haskayne Research Professorship in BTM and serves as the BTM Area Chair at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, in Canada. His primary research interests include information systems, analytics, and quantitative decision and artificial intelligence technologies. Dr. Patterson has published extensively in premier journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, and many others.

Niam Yaraghi

Niam Yaraghi ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor of Business Technology at Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Yaraghi studies the business models and policy structures that incentivize interoperability and sharing of health information among patients, providers, payers and regulators. His research has appeared in leading business journals including Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Production and Operations Management, as well as in the top-tier health policy and informatics journals including Journal of American Medical Informatics Association and Milbank Quarterly.