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Presidential elections in Ecuador: Bot presence in twitter

Abstract:

The world's digital transformation has influenced not only the way we do business, but also the way we perform daily activities. Social media has a clear influence on people, especially during events such as elections where recent international events have shown that social media played an important role. In fact, there are three main aspects in this digital landscape: political movements and political candidates looking for popular support (number of followers), citizens' messages discussing social issues (trending topics on social media), and political propaganda appearing in the net in favor of or against politicians or political movements (advertisement). One of the issues with social media is the presence of automatic accounts (bots) that artificially fill accounts with fake followers, create false trending topics, and share fake news or simply flood the net with propaganda. All this artificially generated information may influence people and sometimes may even censor people's real opinions undermining their freedom of speech and affecting true democracy. In this paper, we present a set of observations based on two main objectives: collect evidence of digital campaigning during the Presidential Elections in Ecuador 2017 and describe the mechanisms used for this campaign. Finally, we show how candidates prepared online campaigns in Twitter and how normal patterns of new followers' subscriptions were altered. And, we collected information about more than 30,000 bots filtered only by political content used for propaganda purposes.