# Political Bots and the Manipulation of Public Opinion in Venezuela

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.07109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.07109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Online User Profiling to Detect Social Bots on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05966/) (2022)
- [Datavoidant: An AI System for Addressing Political Data Voids on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13594/) (2022)
- [Game-Theoretic and Machine Learning-based Approaches for Defensive Deception: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10121/) (2021)
- [Design and analysis of tweet-based election models for the 2021 Mexican legislative election](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00626/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Propaganda Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08709/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social and political bots have a small but strategic role in Venezuelan political conversations. These automated scripts generate content through social media platforms and then interact with people. In this preliminary study on the use of political bots in Venezuela, we analyze the tweeting, following and retweeting patterns for the accounts of prominent Venezuelan politicians and prominent Venezuelan bots. We find that bots generate a very small proportion of all the traffic about political life in Venezuela. Bots are used to retweet content from Venezuelan politicians but the effect is subtle in that less than 10 percent of all retweets come from bot-related platforms. Nonetheless, we find that the most active bots are those used by Venezuela's radical opposition. Bots are pretending to be political leaders, government agencies and political parties more than citizens. Finally, bots are promoting innocuous political events more than attacking opponents or spreading misinformation.