Abstract
Automated agents (“bots”) have emerged as an ubiquitous and influential presence on social media. Bots engage on social media platforms by posting content and replying to other users on the platform. In this work we conduct an empirical analysis of the activity of a single bot on Reddit. Our goal is to determine whether bot activity (in the form of posted comments on the website) has an effect on how humans engage on Reddit. We find that (1) the sentiment of a bot comment has a significant, positive effect on the subsequent human reply, and (2) human Reddit users modify their comment behaviors to overlap with the text of the bot, similar to how humans modify their text to mimic other humans in conversation. Understanding human-bot interactions on social media with relatively simple bots is important for preparing for more advanced bots in the future.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.wnut-1.14
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2020)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Tim Baldwin, Afshin Rahimi
- Venue:
- WNUT
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 101–106
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.wnut-1.14
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.wnut-1.14
- Cite (ACL):
- Ming-Cheng Ma and John P. Lalor. 2020. An Empirical Analysis of Human-Bot Interaction on Reddit. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2020), pages 101–106, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- An Empirical Analysis of Human-Bot Interaction on Reddit (Ma & Lalor, WNUT 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2020.wnut-1.14.pdf