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Bots and Citizens

Sun, May 28, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua 309

Abstract

Users interact online with bots on a daily basis. They tweet, upvote or comment, in short: participate in many different communities and are involved in shaping the user’s perceptions. Based on this experience the users’ perspective on bots may differ significantly from journalists, bot creators or political actors. Yet it is being ignored in the literature up to now. As such we are missing an integral perspective on bots that may help us to understand how the societal discourse surrounding bots is structured. To analyze how and in which context users talk about transparency bots specifically a content analysis and topic analysis of Reddit comments from 86 posts in 48 subreddits on the issue of Wikiedits bots will be conducted. This proposal’s research focuses on two major aspects: how Reddit users 1) frame and with what other 2) topics they associate transparency bots.

Framing in this context is understood as “making sense of relevant events, suggesting what is at issue” (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989, p. 3). Even though some studies have shown, for example, how political actors frame bots (Ford, Dubois, & Puschmann, 2016) a closer look at the user's side is missing. But this perspective is important as non-elite users may have a different view than the more elite political actors that can help us understand in how they interpret bots. This overlooked perspective, then, could have meaningful implications for political actors or bot creators. At the same time it is important to understand the broader context of the user discourse on transparency bots to properly connect the identified frames with overarching topics. Hence an automated topic modeling approach (Blei, Ng & Jordan, 2003) is chosen to identify the underlying themes within the comments. By combining frame analysis with topic modeling this project will highlight the way users talk about transparency bots and in which context they do so and thus emphasize the role of the users within the broader public discourse on bots.

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