Influence of augmented humans in online interactions during voting events

Understand

The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics.

• Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital boundaries is still an open challenge.
• Here we show that online social interactions during a massive voting event can be used to build an accurate map of real-world political parties and electoral ranks.
• We provide evidence that information flow and collective attention are often driven by a special class of highly influential users, that we name "augmented humans", who exploit thousands of automated agents, also known as bots, for enhancing their online influence.