Browsing by Author "Santos, Marcelo"

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    Detection and impact estimation of social bots in the Chilean Twitter network
    (2024) Mendoza Rocha, Marcelo; Providel, Eliana; Santos, Marcelo; Valenzuela, Sebastián
    The rise of bots that mimic human behavior represents one of the most pressing threats to healthy information environments on social media. Many bots are designed to increase the visibility of low-quality content, spread misinformation, and artificially boost the reach of brands and politicians. These bots can also disrupt civic action coordination, such as by flooding a hashtag with spam and undermining political mobilization. Social media platforms have recognized these malicious bots’ risks and implemented strict policies and protocols to block automated accounts. However, effective bot detection methods for Spanish are still in their early stages. Many studies and tools used for Spanish are based on English-language models and lack performance evaluations in Spanish. In response to this need, we have developed a method for detecting bots in Spanish called Botcheck. Botcheck was trained on a collection of Spanish-language accounts annotated in Twibot-20, a large-scale dataset featuring thousands of accounts annotated by humans in various languages. We evaluated Botcheck’s performance on a large set of labeled accounts and found that it outperforms other competitive methods, including deep learning-based methods. As a case study, we used Botcheck to analyze the 2021 Chilean Presidential elections and discovered evidence of bot account intervention during the electoral term. In addition, we conducted an external validation of the accounts detected by Botcheck in the case study and found our method to be highly effective. We have also observed differences in behavior among the bots that are following the social media accounts of official presidential candidates.
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    Sherlock-wannabes or when the audience fact-checks. How ideology, education, and alternative media use explain fact-checking behaviors
    (2023) Saldaña Villa, Magdalena Carolina; Santos, Marcelo
    When confronted with suspicious information, the most common advice is to rely on trusted, well-known news media outlets to verify it. However, in a high-choice, fragmented media ecosystem, news readers might easily find a source that confirms what they previously thought about an issue, or debunks reports that challenge their values and beliefs. As such, alternative news outlets might be a feasible venue for citizens to confront cross-cutting information. At the same time, avoiding contrary information or actively seeking different points of view depends on personal characteristics, such as ideology or education. Drawing upon research on selective exposure and confirmation bias, this study observes how alternative news media use, together with people’s education and political ideology, affect citizens’ fact-checking behaviors when encountering challenging information. Results from a two-wave panel study conducted in Chile suggest that ideology plays a role only for the highly educated, who rely on alternative media to fact-check the most when they are closer to the left side of the political spectrum.
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    Social Media and Belief in Misinformation in Mexico: A Case of Maximal Panic, Minimal Effects?
    (2022) Valenzuela Leighton, Sebastián Andrés; Muñoz, Carlos; Santos, Marcelo
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    Subversive affordances as a form of digital transnational activism: The case of Telegram’s native proxy
    (2021) Santos, Marcelo; Saldaña Villa, Magdalena Carolina; Tsyganova, Ksenia
    Internet, social media, and app shutdowns have become frequent, not only in authoritarian states but also in emerging and fragile democracies. As Russian authorities enforced a legal blockage to Instant Messenger Telegram during the past 2 years, many users kept using the app seamlessly thanks to what we call a subversive affordance: a built-in proxy functionality that allows users to seamlessly circumvent the blockage. We claim it is subversive because it allows users to overcome the blockage as the consequence of the app’s development, with a significant fraction of users who did not have to take action to bypass the blockage. By conducting an online survey and performing a meta-cluster analysis, we found a group we labeled the undeprived: people that, despite presenting traits frequently associated with digital divides—such as gender, age, and low levels of digital skills—were able to keep using the app.
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    The Meso News-Space as a Framework for Studying Mobile Instant Messaging Services
    (2024) Valenzuela, Sebastián; Santos, Marcelo