Understanding Potential Cyber-Armies in Elections: A Study of Taiwan

Abstract

Currently, online social networks are essential platforms for political organizations to monitor public opinion, disseminate information, argue with the opposition, and even achieve spin control. However, once such purposeful/aggressive articles flood social sites, it would be more difficult for users to distinguish which messages to read or to trust. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by identifying potential “cyber-armies/professional users” during election campaigns on social platforms. We focus on human-operated accounts who try to influence public discussions, for instance, by publishing hundreds/thousands of comments to show their support or rejection of particular candidates. To achieve our objectives, we collected activity data over six months from a prominent Taiwan-based social forum before the 2018 national election and applied a series of statistical analyses to screen out potential targets. From the results, we successfully identified several accounts according to distinctive characteristics that corresponded to professional users. According to the findings, users and platforms could realize potential information manipulation and increase the transparency of the online society.

Analyzing the far-right political action on Twitter: the Chilean constituent process

“…The power of Twitter bots attempting to shape or disrupt public opinion should not be ignored (Mintal and Vancel 2019 ), especially considering their possibility to suppress the dissent (Neyazi 2019 ), polarize available agenda constituting “cyber-armies” (Wang et al 2020 ), and become a concern from democracies (Rheault and Musulan 2020 ). In this study, although we cannot assure the presence of bots within the sample of accounts collected, there is evidence of active coordination of accounts created with extremist profiles and a particular purpose.…”

“…In this work, we have considered studies from Japan (Asahina 2019 ; Schäfer et al. 2017 ; Mintal and Vancel 2019 ), Taiwan (Wang et al 2020 ), India (Neyazi 2019 ), Turkey (Erdogan-Ozturk and Isik-Guler 2020 ; Çöltekin 2020 ), Germany (Jaki and Smedt 2019 ), United States (Forscher and Kteily 2019 ), Canada (Bouvier 2020 ; Rheault and Musulan 2020 ), and Latin America (Castillo et al. 2019 ; Waisbord and Amado 2017 ) and we have noticed how homeland as an abstract concept is territorialized (Lazzarato 2017 ) in each territory to produce identification.…”