Manufacturing conflict or advocating peace? A study of social bots agenda building in the Twitter discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war

ABSTRACT

After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, social media become the major contested field for both sides. Social bots are widely involved in the Russia-Ukraine war discussion as communication actors. However, how social bots build the war agenda has not been well answered. This study explores the role of social bots through time series analysis and Structural Topic Model. The study finds that at the aggregate level there is a two-way agenda-setting between social bots and human accounts, and at the secondary level, social bots show different or even opposite agenda-setting effects in national/regional discussion. In addition, we find that social bots exhibit multiple positions in the conversation, reflecting the complexity of the manipulators behind them. This multiplicity of positions reveals that the role played by social bots is still based on the opposition of one side to the other, and the end result may exacerbate the conflict of online public opinion.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia-Ukraine war
• social bots
• information warfare
• agenda setting
• public opinion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [the Young Scientists Fund of the National Social Science Foundation of China “The Impact of Social Bots on the Order of Online Communication”] under Grant [number 22CXW013].

Notes on contributors

Bei Zhao

Bei Zhao is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Arts and Communication at Beijing Normal University. She is interested in intelligence-technology communication, especially the impact of social bots and algorithms on our society.

Wujiong Ren

Wujiong Ren is a master student from Beijing Normal University. His main research interests are intelligence-technology communication, social network analysis and computational communication methods.

Yicheng Zhu

YichengZhu is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University. His research interests include persuasive effects of emerging media and transnational persuasion.

Hongzhong Zhang

HongzhongZhang is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University. His research interests are intelligence-technology communication, communication effectiveness research and credibility research.