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Cited by 524Misinformation and Its ImpactsSpam and Phishing DetectionSocial Media and Politics

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 65 of the 65 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Disinformation and social bot operations in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election

Open access
Ferrara, Emilio·2017·First Monday
DOI 10.5210/fm.v22i8.8005
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Abstract

Recent accounts from researchers, journalists, as well as federal investigators, reached a unanimous conclusion: social media are systematically exploited to manipulate and alter public opinion. Some disinformation campaigns have been coordinated by means of bots, social media accounts controlled by computer scripts that try to disguise themselves as legitimate human users. In this study, we describe one such operation that occurred in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election. We collected a massive Twitter dataset of nearly 17 million posts, posted between 27 April and 7 May 2017 (Election Day). We then set to study the MacronLeaks disinformation campaign: By leveraging a mix of machine learning and cognitive behavioral modeling techniques, we separated humans from bots, and then studied the activities of the two groups independently, as well as their interplay. We provide a characterization of both the bots and the users who engaged with them, and oppose it to those users who didn’t. Prior interests of disinformation adopters pinpoint to the reasons of scarce success of this campaign: the users who engaged with MacronLeaks are mostly foreigners with pre-existing interest in alt-right topics and alternative news media, rather than French users with diverse political views. Concluding, anomalous account usage patterns suggest the possible existence of a black market for reusable political disinformation bots.

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Allport, G. W., & Postman, L. (1947). The psychology of rumor. Oxford Press
  2. Gilani, Z., Wang, L., Crowcroft, J., Almeida, M., & Farahbakhsh, R. (2016, April). Stweeler: A Framework for Twitter Bot Analysis. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (pp. 37-38). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.
  3. Kollanyi, B. (2016). Where Do Bots Come From? An Analysis of Bot Codes Shared on GitHub. International Journal of Communication, 10(20).
  4. Kollanyi, B., Howard, P. N., & Woolley, S. C. (2016). Bots and Automation over Twitter during the First U.S. Presidential Debate. Data Memo 2016.1. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda.
  5. Savage, S., Monroy-Hernandez, A., & Höllerer, T. (2016). Botivist: Calling Volunteers to Action using Online Bots. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 813-822). ACM.

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Metadata

Authors
Ferrara, E.
Affiliations
University of Southern California (US)
Corresponding author
Ferrara, Emilio
ORCID
Ferrara, Emilio
Venue
First Monday
Publisher
University of Illinois Libraries
Published
2017-07-31
ISSN
  • 1396-0458 (ISSN-L)
  • 1396-0466
DOI
10.5210/fm.v22i8.8005
OpenAlex
W2724523750
Cited by
524
References
65
Citations by year
2026: 32 · 2025: 39 · 2024: 56 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 64 · 2021: 73 · 2020: 92 · 2019: 64 · 2018: 52 · 2017: 4
FWCI
148.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • First Monday (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (publishedVersion)
  • First Monday (acceptedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
Keywords
disinformation, social bots, 2017 French presidential election, Twitter, bot detection, human-bot interaction, public opinion manipulation, alt-right

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