Ancient Bots for Social Media

The spiral of silence is a theory of Noelle-Neumann stating that the formulated opinion of others heavily influences our own contributions to discourse. We tested this with twitter-bots, which were based on the famous 36 stratagems of asian descent. The bots inpersonated real users, reacted to each others answers in selected political threads and successfully steered online discussions, by either confusing, deflecting or answering to real users.

Documentation from related course at UdK Berlin.