Bots are ruining cities IRL

“Election-interference” and “censorship machines” are how we tend to think of bots in digital spaces. Just as bots can disrupt elections in-real-life, they can also impact the conversations happening online with urban development and planning. My research with Professor Maxwell Hartt (Queen’s University), Professor Ruth Potts (Cardiff University) and former students Minyu Situ and Alexander Seto found that bots are a dangerous influence on the kinds of discourse that happens in response to real estate development projects. We found that as many as half of all Tweets on some projects were generated by bots.

Article Highlights

• Research explored the impacts that social bots have on the local planning context.

• Machine learning tools were employed to classify Twitter accounts as bots.

• Analysis found that upwards of 50% of Tweets concerning various real estate development projects were generated by bots.

Full text of article: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1g8tDjFQguwhO