Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela

Social and political bots have a small but strategic role in Venezuelan political conversations. These automated scripts generate content through social media platforms and then interact with people. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots in Venezuela, we analyze the tweeting, following and retweeting patterns for the accounts of prominent Venezuelan politicians and prominent Venezuelan bots. We find that bots generate a very small proportion of all the traffic about political life in Venezuela. Bots are used to retweet content from Venezuelan politicians but the effect is subtle in that less than 10 percent of all retweets come from bot-related platforms. Nonetheless, we find that the most active bots are those used by Venezuela’s radical opposition. Bots are pretending to be political leaders, government agencies and political parties more than citizens. Finally, bots are promoting innocuous political events more than attacking opponents or spreading misinformation. FROM SOCIAL BOTS TO POLITICAL BOTS It is widely acknowledged that several regimes employ both people and bots to engage in political conversations online. The Chinese, Iranian, and Russian, governments employ their own social-media experts and pay small amounts of money to large numbers of people to generate progovernment messages.[1] The word “botnet” comes from combining “robot” with “network,” and it describes a collection of programs that communicate across multiple devices to perform some task. The tasks can be simple and annoying, like generating spam. The tasks can be aggressive and malicious, like choking off exchange points or launching denial-of-service attacks. Not all are developed to advance political causes. Some seem to have been developed for fun or to support criminal enterprises, but all share the property of deploying messages and replicating themselves.[2] There are two types of bots: legitimate and malicious. Legitimate bots, like the Carna Bot, which gave us our first real census of device networks, generate a large amount of benign tweets that deliver news or update feeds. Malicious bots, on the other hand, spread spam by delivering appealing text content with the linkdirected malicious content. Botnets are created for many reasons: spam, DDoS attacks, theft of confidential information, click fraud, cybersabotage, and cyber-warfare.[3] Many governments have been strengthening their cyberwarfare capabilities for both defensive and offensive purposes. In addition, political actors and governments worldwide have begun using bots to manipulate public opinion, choke off debate, and muddy political issues. Social bots are particularly prevalent on Twitter.[4] They are computer-generated programs that post, tweet, or message of their own accord. Often bot profiles lack basic account information such as screen names or profile pictures. Such accounts have become known as “Twitter eggs” because the default profile picture on the social-media site is of an egg. While social-media users get access from front-end websites, bots get access to such websites directly through a mainline, code-to-code connection, mainly through the site’s wide-open application programming interface (API), posting and parsing information in real time. Bots are versatile, cheap to produce, and ever evolving. “These bots,” argues Rob Dubbin, “whose DNA can be written in almost any modern programming language, live on cloud servers, which never go dark and grow cheaper by day.”[5] Unscrupulous internet users now deploy bots beyond mundane commercial tasks like spamming or scraping sites like eBay for bargains. Bots are the primary applications used in carrying out distributed denial-ofservice and virus attacks, email harvesting, and content theft. A subset of social bots are given overtly political tasks and the use of political bots varies across regime types. DATA, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA Twitter has become a powerful communication tool during many kinds of crises, political or otherwise. When the drug war erupted neither the drug lords nor the government expected a network of real-time war correspondents to spring up to report battles between police and gangs. Tweeting certainly didn’t stop the drug war. But it helped people to cope. We can’t measure how important the sense of online community provided by active tweeting can be in the first few weeks of a crisis, both in providing moral support and in keeping people safe. A few citizens rise to the occasion, curating content and helping to distinguish good information from bad.[2, p. 22], [6] These are other examples of how people create their own public alert systems. When Hurricane Sandy hit Santiago, Cuba, information didn’t come from the state; it came from the country’s independent (illegal) journalists. Text messages about serious damage and the loss of life circulated