Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela

Understand

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.