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Political Bots

Political bots are an important part of a national discussion about the future of Canada’s democracy.

Work on “political bots” (automated social media accounts which mimic human actors) has often focused on computational propaganda and the potential negative impacts of automation in politics. This project examines the types of political bots that exist and their complex relationships with other political actors. A series of papers highlights that political bots are neither necessarily good nor bad. This work contributes to important policy conversations. For example, the use of bots in Canada’s political landscape gives rise to concerns about political advertising and voter suppression and this work has been used to help develop policy responses.

Methods:

  • Case studies of the 2015 federal election in Canada and of the WikiEdits bot @gccaedits

  • Manual content analysis of tweets and newspaper articles

  • Review of government documents collected via ATIP requests

  • In-depth interviews with policy makers, bot creators, journalisms and other political actors

Outputs:

  • Dubois, E. & McKelvey, F. (2018). Building bot typologies. In Woolley, S. and Howard, P. Computational Propaganda. (pp. 64-85). Oxford University Press.

  • Dubois, E. & McKelvey, F. (2019). Political Bots: Disrupting Canada’s Democracy. Canadian Journal of Communication, 44(2), 27-33. 

Project leads and collaborators:

Dr. Elizabeth Dubois, Dr. Fenwick McKelvey, Dr. Heather Ford, Dr. Cornelius Puschmann, Dr. Amanda Clarke

Funding for this project is provided by the University of Ottawa Research Chair in Politics, Communication and Technology.

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