Hi folks!
I guess you are aware that social media bots become more and more relevant for politics. Those bots are mainly used to influence voters by systematically spreading misinformation aka fake news. If you want to know more about this topic in general, then this Scientific American article is a good starting point. Living in Austria, I want to explore a little whether our politicians can be associated with any bots. To do so, we will look at the twitter accounts of one top politician per party. From the administration, I have selected our chancellor Sebastian Kurz @sebastiankurz for the ÖVP and the vice-chancellor H.C. Strache @HCStracheFP for the FPÖ. Those two were easy, but picking good representatives of the parties in the opposition was a little harder because there has been quite a lot of change in the top positions. Since the new chairperson of the SPÖ, P. Rendi-Wagner, is not very active on twitter we will use the managing director, Thomas Drozda @thomasdrozda, instead. For the GRÜNE I have chosen the most well known Grünen at the moment, our president, A. Van der Bellen @vanderbellen. For the NEOS we will use their new head, Beate Meinl-Reisinger @BMeinl, and for JETZT their founder, Peter Pilz @Peter_Pilz.
With the help of the program Botometer, which was developed at Indiana University and scores twitter accounts between 0 (surely a human) and 5 (surely a bot), we will check, whether
- bots supported the politicians and
- politicians supported bots
by retweeting.
