Caught in the propaganda crossfire? Bots on social media.

Lisa-Maria Neudert State and non-state political actors are using
algorithms and automation in efforts to sway public opinion. In
some circumstances, the ways coded automation interacts with or
affects human users is unforeseeable. In others, individuals
and organizations work to build software that purposefully targets
voters, activists, and political opponents. Politicized social bots
are one version of potentially malicious automated programs.
Understanding how technologies like these are used to spread
propaganda, engage with citizens, and influence political outcomes
are pressing problems.  Recent findings confirm that there is
bot activity in Germany: Angela Merkel was bombarded with
bot-generated hate speech messages after the Berlin Christmas
market attack; right-wing accounts on Twitter propagate
xenophobic messages in relation to the German refugee debate;
botnetworks supporting the AfD have been discovered on
Facebook. What is more, after Merkel cautioned the German
Bundestag in November 2016 against automated manipulation of
opinion, there has been a heated discussion on how to regulate
social bots. Parties and journalists are scrambling to come up with
overblown proposals that might heavily restrict freedom of
expression.  We have interviewed German bot developers,
journalists, data scientists, policy makers, cyber-warfare
specialists, and victims of bot attacks in order to investigate
the application and potential impacts of computational
propaganda in Germany; especially in relation to the
Bundestagswahlen 2017, the ongoing refugee debate, right-wing
populist politics and individual activism. We then work with
computer scientists to detect and track bots on social media in
Germany. With "real-time" social and information science we can
examine automated propaganda in relation to events and debates,
such as the Bundespraesidentenwahl 2017.