arXiv subjects

Saiph Savage

Publications and source records attributed to Saiph Savage.

40 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action Using Online Bots

To help activists call new volunteers to action, we present Botivist: a platform that uses Twitter bots to find potential volunteers and request contributions. By leveraging different Twitter accounts, Botivist employs different strategies to encourage participation. We explore how people respond to bots calling them to action using a test case about corruption in Latin America. Our results show that the majority of volunteers (>80%) who responded to Botivist's calls to action contributed relevant proposals to address the assigned social problem. Different strategies produced differences in the quantity and relevance of contributions. Some strategies that work well offline and face-to-face appeared to hinder people's participation when used by an online bot. We analyze user behavior in response to being approached by bots with an activist purpose. We also provide strong evidence for the value of this type of civic media, and derive design implications.

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arXiv2015

Tag Me Maybe: Perceptions of Public Targeted Sharing on Facebook

Social network sites allow users to publicly tag people in their posts. These tagged posts allow users to share to both the general public and a targeted audience, dynamically assembled via notifications that alert the people mentioned. We investigate people's perceptions of this mixed sharing mode through a qualitative study with 120 participants. We found that individuals like this sharing modality as they believe it strengthens their relationships. Individuals also report using tags to have more control of Facebook's ranking algorithm, and to expose one another to novel information and people. This work helps us understand people's complex relationships with the algorithms that mediate their interactions with each another. We conclude by discussing the design implications of these findings.

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arXiv2015

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.

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arXiv2015

Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience

Armed groups of civilians known as "self-defense forces" have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoacan. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the "VXM" ("Valor por Michoacan," Spanish for "Courage for Michoacan") Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War has documented the use of social media for real-time reports of violent clashes. However, VXM goes one step further by taking on a pro-militia propagandist role, engaging in two-way communication with its audience. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of VXM and its audience. We examined nine months of posts, from VXM's inception until May 2014, totaling 6,000 posts by VXM administrators and more than 108,000 comments from its audience. We describe the main conversation themes, post frequency and relationships with offline events and public figures. We also characterize the behavior of VXM's most active audience members. Our work illustrates VXM's online mobilization strategies, and how its audience takes part in defining the narrative of this armed conflict. We conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future communication technologies.

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