The Jeremy Tunstall Global Media Research Centre continued its seminar series this week with Marco Bastos

On Wednesday the 6th of December, Marco Bastos, Lecturer, City, University of London, gave the following talk.

 

Title: “Brexit Botnet and the Strategic Deployment of Tiwtterbots”

 

Abstract: In this talk we explore the Brexit debate on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the referendum vote. We discuss novel research uncovering a large network of Twitterbots that retweeted hyperpartisan news and disappeared from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We look into the occurrence of filter bubbles and show that echo-chambers are associated with homophily in the physical world, chiefly the geographic proximity between users advocating sides of the referendum campaign. The talk concludes with an overview of a proof of concept study that uses social media signal to identify ideological shifts in the British society.

 

Bio:  Dr Bastos is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London where he teaches media and communication theory and research methods. Previous to that he held research positions at the University of Sao Paulo, University of California at Davis, where he remains an affiliate at the Data Science Initiative, and Duke University, where he is an affiliate of the Duke Network Analysis Center.